वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

158 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. (devānāṁ pūrve yuge) and also of the later age (uttare yuge). Western scholars are accustomed to interpret yuga to mean 'a generation of men' almost in every place where the phrase is met with; and we shall have to consider the correctness of this interpretation later on. For the purpose of this legend it is enough to state that the phrase pūrvyam yugam occurs twice in the hymn, and that where it first occurs (in verse 2), it clearly denotes 'an early age' or 'some division of time.' Naturally enough we must, therefore, interpret it in the same way where it occurs again in the same hymn, viz., in the verse describing the legend of Aditi's seven sons. The sun having seven rays, or seven horses, also implies the same idea differently expressed. The seven months of sunshine, with their different temperatures, are represented by seven suns producing these different results by being differently located, or as having different kinds of rays, or as having different chariots, or horses, or different wheels to the same chariot. It is one and the same idea in different forms, or as the Ṛig-Veda puts it, "one horse with seven names," (I, 164, 2). A long dawn of thirty days indicates a period of sunshine for seven months; and we now see that the legend of Aditi is intelligible only if we interpret it as a relic of a time when there were seven flourishing month-gods, and the eighth was either still- born, or cast away. Mārtāṇḍa is etymologically derived from mārta meaning 'dead or undeveloped', (being connected with mṛita, the past participle of mṛi, to die) and aṇḍa, an egg or a bird; and it denotes a dead sun, or a sun that has sunk below the horizon, for in Ṛig. X, 55, 5, we find the word mamāra (died) used to denote the setting of the daily sun. The sun is also repre- sented as a bird in many places in the Ṛig-Veda (V, 47,3; X, 55, 6; X, 177, 1; X, 189, 3). A cast away bird (Mārtāṇḍa) is, there- fore, the sun that has set or sunk below the horizon, and the whole legend is obviously a reminiscence of the place