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

390 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. are the Uttara Kurus whom no one attempts to combat. That the Uttara Kurus were not a fabulous land is shown by the fact that a mountain, a people and a city called Ottoro- corra is mentioned by Ptolemy, and Lassen thinks that Me- gasthenes had the Uttara Kurus in view when he referred to the Hyperboreans. Muir concludes this section with a passage from the Sânkhyâyana or the Kaushîtakî Brâhmaṇa (VII, 6) where Pathyâ Svasti, or the goddess of speech, is said to know the northern region (udîchîm disham), and we are told that " Hence in the northern region speech is better known and better spoken, and it is to the north that men go to learn speech." Muir thinks that some faint reminiscence of an early connection with the north may be traced in these pass- ages. But none of them are conclusive, nor have we any in- dication therein of the original home being in tho Arctic re- gions, as we have in the case of the Vedic passages discussed previously which speak of the long, continuous dawn and night, or a year of ten months. We may, however, take the passages cited by Muir as corroborative evidence and they have been referred to here in the same light. It is upon the Vedic passages and legends examined in the previous chapters and the Avestic evidence discussed above that we mainly rely for establishing the existence of the primeval Aryan home in the Arctic regions; and when both these are taken together we get direct traditional testimony for holding that the origi- nal home of the Aryan races was situated near the North Pole and not in Central Asia, that it was destroyed by the advent of the Glacial epoch, and that the Indo-Iranians, who were compelled to leave the country, migrated southwards, and passing thr ough several provinces of Central Asia even- tually settled in the valleys of the Oxus, the Indus, the Kubhâ and the Rasâ, from which region we see them again migrating, the Indians to the east and the Persians to the west at the early dawn of the later traditional history.