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

MONTHS AND SEASONS. 149
—Indicates darkness of the long night—Not made up by
combining any two consecutive seasons out of six—The ex-
planation in the Brâhmaṇas improbable—Summary.
Starting with the tradition about the half-yearly night
of the gods found everywhere in Sanskrit literature, and also in
the Avesta, we have found direct references in the Ṛig-Veda to
a long continuous dawn of thirty days, the long day and the long
night, when the sun remained above the horizon or went below
it for a number of 24 hours ; and we have also seen that the
Ṛig-Vedic texts describe these things as events of a bye-gone
age. The next question, therefore, is—Do we meet in the
Vedas with similar traces of the Arctic condition of seasons,
months or years? It is stated previously that the calendar
current at the time of the Vedic Saṁhitâs was different from
the Arctic calendar. But if the ancestors of the Vedic people
ever lived near the North Pole, “we may,” as observed by Sir
Norman Lockyer with reference to the older Egyptian calendar,
“always reckon upon the conservatism of the priests of the
temples retaining the tradition of the old rejected year in every
case.” Sir Norman Lockyer first points out how the ancient
Egyptian year of 360 days was afterwards replaced by a year
of 365 days; and then gives two instances of the traditional
practice by which the memory of the old year was preserved.
“Thus even at Philæ in later times,” says he, “in the temple of
Osiris, there were 360 bowls for sacrifice, which were filled
daily with milk by a specified rotation of priests. At Acanthus
there was a perforated cask into which one of the 360 priests
poured water from the Nile daily.”* And what took place in
Egypt, we may expect to have taken place in Vedic times. The
characteristics of an Arctic year are so unlike those of a year
in the temperate zone, that if the ancestors of the Vedic

• See Lockyer’s Dawn of Astronomy, p. 248.