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

202 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
V, 14, 4, is praised for killing the fiends, for having overcome
darkness by light, and having found the cows, water and the
sun."
"In all these passages we find no iva or na, which would
indicate that the word cow was used metaphorically. The
dawns or days as they proceed from the dark stable, or are
rescued from evil spirits, are spoken of directly as the cows. If
they are spoken of in the plural, we find the same in the case
of the Dawn (ushas) who is often conceived as many, as in II,
28, 2, upâyane ushasâm gomatinâm, 'at the approach of the
dawns with their cows.' From that it required but a small
step to speak of the one Dawn as the mother of the cows, IV,
52, 2, mâtâ gavâm."
"Kuhn thought that these cows should be understood as the
red clouds of the morning. But clouds are not always present
at sunrise, nor can it well be said that they are carried off and
kept in prison during the night by the powers of darkness."
"But What is important and settles the point is the fact
that these cows or oxen of the dawn or of the rising sun occur
in other mythologies also and are there clearly meant for days.
They are numbered as 12 × 30, that is, the thirty days of the 12
lunar months. If Hêlios has 350 oxen and 350 sheep, that can
only refer to the days and to the nights of the year, and would
prove the knowledge of a year of 350 days before the Aryan
separation."
"Thus the cows in mythology are the days and nights, or
dawns, that are imprisoned by Paṇi, and not real living cows
with horns. Adopting this explanation and substituting these
metaphorical cows for gavâḥ in the Gavâm-ayanam, it is not
difficult to see that underneath the strange story of cows
holding a sacrificial session for getting horns, there lies concealed
the remarkable phenomenon, that, released from the clutches
of Paṇi, these cows of days and nights walked on for ten
months, the oldest duration of the session known as Cows'