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

V DIC MYTHS—THE CAPTIVE WATERS. 235 Ṛig-Veda as moving round like a wheel, a characteristic, which is true only in the case of the Polar dawn. These facts suffici- ently prove the acquaintance of the Vedic bards with the physical phenomena, witnessible only in the Arctic regions. But to make the matter more certain, I have, in the last three chapters, quoted and discussed Vedic passages, which go to prove that the long Arctic nights and the corresponding long days of varying duration, as well as a year of ten months or five seasons, were equally known to the poets of the Ṛig-Veda. An examination of the ancient sacrificial system and especially of the annual Sattras and night-sacrifices, further showed that in old times yearly sacrificial sessions did not last for twelve months as at present, but were completed in nine or ten months; and the hundred night-scarifices were, at that time, really performed as their name indicates, during the darkness of the long night. The legends of Dîrghatamas and Aditi's sons, and the tradition about the sacrificial sessions of the Navagvas and the Dashag- vas also pointed to the same conclusion. Our case does not, therefore, depend on an isolated fact here and an isolated fact there. We have seen that the half-year-long day and night, the long dawn with its revolving splendours, the long continuous night matched by the corresponding long day and associated with a succession of ordinary days and nights of varying lengths, and the total annual period of sunshine of less than twelve months are the principal peculiar characteristics of the Polar or the Circum-Polar calendar; and when express pas- sages are found in the Vedas, the oldest record of early Aryan thoughts and sentiments, showing that each and every one of these characteristics was known to the Vedic bards, who themselves lived in a region where the year was made up of three hundred and sixty or three hundred and sixty five days, one is irresistibly led to the conclusion that the poets of the Ṛig-Veda must have known these facts by tradition and that