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

420 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. that while the Taittirîya Saṁhitâ and the Brâhmaṇas begin the Nakṣhatras with the Kṛittikâs or the Pleiades, show- ing that the vernal equinox then coincided with the aforesaid asterism (2500 B. C.), the Vedic literature contains traces of Mṛiga or Orion being once the first of the Nakṣhatras and the hymns of the Ṛig-Veda, or at least many of them, which are undoubtedly older than the Taittirîya Saṁhitâ, contain refer- ence to this period, that is, about 4500 B. C. approximately. It is also pointed out that there are faint traces of the same equinox being once in the constellation of Punarvasû, presid- ed over by Aditi, which was possible in about 6,000 B. C. I have in my later researches tried to push back this limit by searching for the older zodiacal positions of the vernal equinox in the Vedic literature, but I have not found any evidence of the same. My attention was, however, directed more and more to passages containing traces of an Arctic calendar and an Arctic home, and I have been gradually led to infer therefrom that at about 5000 or 6000 B. C., the Vedic Aryas had settled on the plains of Central Asia, and that at the time the tradi- tions about the existence of the Arctic home and its destruc- tion by snow and ice, as well as about the Arctic origin of the Vedic deities, were definitely known to the bards of these races. In short, reserches in Vedic chronology and calendar do not warrant us in placing the advent of the last Glacial epoch, which destroyed the ancient Aryan home, at a time several thousands of years previous to the Orion period ; and from what has been stated in the first two chapters of the book, it will be seen that this estimate well agrees with the conclusions of American geologists, who, from an examination of the erosion of valleys and similar other well-ascertained facts, as- sign to the close of the last Glacial epoch a date not older than about 8000 B. C. We might even go further and say that an- cient Vedic chronology and calendar furnish an independent corroboration of the moderate view of the American geologists ;