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

108 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
we mean to prove is that Uṣhas, or the Goddess of dawn, the first
appearance of which was so eagerly and anxiously looked to, and
which formed the subject of so many beautiful hymns in the
Vedic literature, is not the evanescent dawn of the tropics, but the
long, continuous and revolving dawn of the pole; and if we have
succeeded in proving this from the passages discussed above, it
matters little if a passage or more are found elsewhere in the
Ṛig-Veda, describing the ordinary tropical dawn. The Vedic
Ṛiṣhis, who sang the present hymns, must have been familiar with
the tropical dawn, if they now and then added a 13th month to
secure the correspondence of the lunar and the solar year. But
the deity of the Dawn was an ancient deity, the attributes of
which had become known to the Ṛiṣhis by orally preserved
traditions, about the primeval home; and the dawn-hymns, as we
now possess them, faithfully describe these characteristics. How
these old characteristics of the Goddess of Dawn were preserved
for centuries is a question to which I shall revert after
examining the whole of the Vedic evidence bearing on the Polar
theory. For the present we may assume that these reminiscences
of the old home were preserved much in the same way as we
have preserved the hymns, accent for accent and letter for letter,
for the last three or four thousand years.
It will be seen from the foregoing discussion that if the dawn-
hymns in the Ṛig-Veda be read and studied in the light of modern
scientific discoveries and with the aid of passages in the Atharva-
Veda and the Taittirîya Saṁhitâ and Brâhmaṇa, they clearly
establish the following results:—
(1) The Ṛig-Vedic dawn was so long that several days
elapsed between the first appearance of light on the
horizon and the sunrise which followed it, (VII, 76, 3,); or,