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

202 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. V, 14, 4, is praised for killing the fiends, for having overcome darkness by light, and having found the cows, water and the sun." "In all these passages we find no iva or na, which would indicate that the word cow was used metaphorically. The dawns or days as they proceed from the dark stable, or are rescued from evil spirits, are spoken of directly as the cows. If they are spoken of in the plural, we find the same in the case of the Dawn (ushas) who is often conceived as many, as in II, 28, 2, upâyane ushasâm gomatinâm, 'at the approach of the dawns with their cows.' From that it required but a small step to speak of the one Dawn as the mother of the cows, IV, 52, 2, mâtâ gavâm." "Kuhn thought that these cows should be understood as the red clouds of the morning. But clouds are not always present at sunrise, nor can it well be said that they are carried off and kept in prison during the night by the powers of darkness." "But What is important and settles the point is the fact that these cows or oxen of the dawn or of the rising sun occur in other mythologies also and are there clearly meant for days. They are numbered as 12 × 30, that is, the thirty days of the 12 lunar months. If Hêlios has 350 oxen and 350 sheep, that can only refer to the days and to the nights of the year, and would prove the knowledge of a year of 350 days before the Aryan separation." "Thus the cows in mythology are the days and nights, or dawns, that are imprisoned by Paṇi, and not real living cows with horns. Adopting this explanation and substituting these metaphorical cows for gavâḥ in the Gavâm-ayanam, it is not difficult to see that underneath the strange story of cows holding a sacrificial session for getting horns, there lies concealed the remarkable phenomenon, that, released from the clutches of Paṇi, these cows of days and nights walked on for ten months, the oldest duration of the session known as Cows'