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

294 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. who, taking their cue from the Hapta-hindu of the Avesta, eloquently advanced the theory that the seven rivers, set free by Indra, were the rivers of the Panjaub. This explanation, when first started, was regarded as an important historical discovery ; and so it would have been, if it had been a real fact. But, as pointed out above, the Panjaub is, by nature, a land of five rivers and not seven ; and it is so described in the Vâjasaneyî Saṁhitâ. It is also evident that as the seven rivers, set free to flow by Indra, were released simultaneously with the dawn, they could not be the rivers of the Panjaub. We do not mean to say that the Panjaub was not an Aryan settle- ment at the time when the Vedic hymns were sung, for the rivers of the Panjaub are expressly mentioned in the Ṛig-Veda. But the rivers of the Panjaub were not the seven rivers mentioned in the Vedas ; and if so, a new explanation of the Vṛitra legend becomes necessary, and such an explanation is furnished only by the theory of the cosmic circulation of aerial waters or rivers through the lower and the upper world, carry- ing along with them the sun, the moon and the other heav- enly bodies. We can now very well explain how Vṛitra, by stretching his body across, closed the passages in the mountain- ous ranges (parvatas), which, on the analogy of mountains usually seen on the horizon, were believed to lie between the upper and the lower world ; and how the waters, and with them the sun and the dawn, were prevented from coming up from the nether world for a long time in the Arctic home of the ancestors of the Vedic bards. Another oint elucidated by the present theory is the four-fold character of the effects of Indra's conquest over Vṛitra, a point which has been entirely neglected by ancient and modern Nairuktas, not because it was unknown but because they were unable to give any satisfactory explanation of the same, except on the hypothesis that differ- ent effects have been confounded with one other by the poets of the Ṛig-Veda. But the theory of the cosmic circulation of