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

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION. 427 Now considering the fact that the Kṛita age is said to commence after a pralaya or the deluge, Manu and Vyâsa must be under- stood to have preserved herein an old tradition that about 10,000 years before their time (supposing them to have lived at the beginning of the Kali age of 1200 years), the new order of things commenced with the Kṛita age; or, in other words, the deluge which destroyed the old order of things occured about 10,000 years before their time. The tradition has been very much distorted owing to devices adopted in later times to make the traditional chronology suit the circumstances of the day. But still it is not difficult to ascertain the original character of the tradition; and when we do so, we are led to conclude that the beginning of the new order of things, or, to put it more scienti- fically, the commencement of the current post-Glacial era was, according to this tradition, not assigned to a period older than 10,000 years before the Christian era. We have shown that researches in Vedic chronology do not allow us to carry back the date of the post-Glacial era beyond this estimate, for traditions of the Arctic home appear to have been well understood by the bards of the Ṛig-Veda in the Orion period. It is, therefore, al- most certain that the invasion of the Arctic Aryan home by the last Glacial epoch did not take place at a time older than 10,000 B. C. The American geologists, we have seen, have arrived at the same conclusion on independent scientific grounds; and when the Vedic and the Purâṇic chronology indicate nearly the same time,—a difference of one or two thousand years, in such cases, does not matter much,—we may safely reject the extra- vagant estimates of 20,000 or 80,000 years and adopt, for all practical purposes, the view that the last Glacial epoch closed and the post-Glacial period commenced at about 8,000, or, at best, about 10,000 B. C. We have now to consider how the tradition about the exist- ence of the original home at the North Pole and its destruction