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

360 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. The old Persian and Greek names in the above table are taken from the inscriptions of the Achæmenian kings and the works of Greek writers after the overthrow of the Achæme- nian dynasty by Alexander the Great. They show that at least 10 out of 16 lands can be still indentified with certainty; and if so, we can safely say that the account in the first Fargard is real and not mythical. But with regard to the land mention- ed first in the list, there has been a difference of opinion amongst Zend scholars. The Airyana Vaêjo is the first creat- ed happy land, and the name signifies that it was the birth- land (Vaêjo = seed, Sans. bîja) of the Aryans (Iranians), or the Paradise of the Iranian race. Was this a mythical region or a real country representing the original home of the Aryans, and if it was a real country where was it situated? This is the first question which we have to answer from the evidence contained in the first two Fargards of the Vendidad; and se- condly, we have to decide whether the sixteen lands mentioned above were the successive countries occupied by the ancestors of the Iranian race in their migrations from the original home in the north. The Fargard says nothing about migration. It simply mentions that so many lands were created by Ahura Mazda and that in opposition thereto Angra Mainyu, the evil Spirit of the Avesta, created so many different evils and plagues which rendered the lands unfit for human residence. It is inferred from this that the Fargard does not contain an ac- count of successive migrations, but merely gives us a descrip- tion of the countries known to the ancestors of the Iranians at the time when the Fargards were composed. In other words, the chapter is geographical and not historical, containing no- thing but a specification of the countries known to the Ira- nians at a particular time; and it is argued that it would be converting geography into history to take the different coun- tries to represent the successive stages of migrations from the primeval home, when not a word about migration is found in