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

364 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. more likely that Rangha may be the Vedic Rasâ, a tri- butary of the Indus? If the context is any guide to the deter- mination of the sense of ambiguous words, the mention of Hapta Heṇdu, as the fifteenth land, shows that Rasâ the six- teenth must be sought for somewhere near it, and the point is pretty well settled when we find Rasâ actually mentioned in the Ṛig-Veda along with some other tributaries of the Indus. The identification of Rangha with the western- most river is, therefore, at best doubtful, and the same may be said of Vanguhi, which by-the-by is not mentioned in the Fargard at all. But Darmesteter's reasoning does not stop here. On the strength of this doubtful identifica- tion he would have us believe that the ancient land of the Airyana Vaêjo was situated in the same region where the river named Vanguhi, or Vêh, in later times was said to flow. But the reasoning is obviously erroneous. The names of the two rivers Vanguhi and Rangha in the primeval home may have been subsequently transferred to the real rivers in the new settlement; but we cannot infer therefrom that the country through which these new rivers flowed was the original site of the Airyana Vaêjo. It is a well-known fact that persons migrating from their motherland to new countries often name the places they come across after the names of places familiar to them in their motherland. But on that account no one has ventured to place England in America or Australia; and it is strange how such a mistake should have been committed by Zend scholars in the present case. For even if a province or country in Central Asia had been named Airyana Vaêjo, we could not have located the original home in that Province; just as the abode of Varuṇa cannot be placed in the land named Varena, which is the Zend equiva- lent of Varuṇa. The whole of Darmesteter's reasoning must, therefore, be rejected as unsound and illogical, and but for the preconceived notion that the original home of the Iranians