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

264 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. Savitṛi is described as going round the night on both sides is already referred to above. With these passages before us, we cannot reasonably hold that the Vedic bards were ignorant of the lower celestial hemisphere, as supposed by Wallis and some other scholars. Nor is the hypothesis a priori probable, for I have shown else- where that the Vedic bards knew enough of astronomy to calculate the movements of the sun and the moon tolerably correct for all practical purposes; and the people, who could do this, could not be supposed to be so ignorant as to believe that the sky was nailed down to the earth at the celestial hori- zon, and that when the sun was not seen during the night, he must be taken to have disappeared somewhere in the upper regions of the heaven. The passage from the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (III, 44), which is quoted by Wallis, and which tells us that the sun, having reached the end of the day, turns round as it were, and makes night where there was day before and day on the other side, and vice versa, is very vague and does not prove that the sun was believed to return by night through a region, which is somewhere in the upper heaven. The words used in the original are avastāt and parastāt; and Dr. Haug correctly trans- lates parastāt by 'what is on the other side.' Muir and others, however, interpret parastāt to mean 'upper,' thus giving rise to the hypothesis that the sun returns during night by a passage through the upper region of the heaven. But in the face of the express passages in which regions below and above all the three earths are unmistakably mentioned, we cannot accept a hy- pothesis based upon a doubtful translation of a single word. It is a hypothesis that has its origin either in the preconceived notion regarding the primitive man, or in a desire to import into the Vedas the speculations of the Homeric cosmography. The knowledge of the Vedic bards regarding the nether world may not have been as exact as that of the modern astronomers, and we,