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

294 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
who, taking their cue from the Hapta-hindu of the Avesta,
eloquently advanced the theory that the seven rivers, set free
by Indra, were the rivers of the Panjaub. This explanation,
when first started, was regarded as an important historical
discovery ; and so it would have been, if it had been a real
fact. But, as pointed out above, the Panjaub is, by nature, a
land of five rivers and not seven ; and it is so described in the
Vâjasaneyî Saṁhitâ. It is also evident that as the seven rivers,
set free to flow by Indra, were released simultaneously with
the dawn, they could not be the rivers of the Panjaub. We
do not mean to say that the Panjaub was not an Aryan settle-
ment at the time when the Vedic hymns were sung, for the
rivers of the Panjaub are expressly mentioned in the Ṛig-Veda.
But the rivers of the Panjaub were not the seven rivers
mentioned in the Vedas ; and if so, a new explanation of the
Vṛitra legend becomes necessary, and such an explanation is
furnished only by the theory of the cosmic circulation of aerial
waters or rivers through the lower and the upper world, carry-
ing along with them the sun, the moon and the other heav-
enly bodies. We can now very well explain how Vṛitra, by
stretching his body across, closed the passages in the mountain-
ous ranges (parvatas), which, on the analogy of mountains
usually seen on the horizon, were believed to lie between the
upper and the lower world ; and how the waters, and with
them the sun and the dawn, were prevented from coming up
from the nether world for a long time in the Arctic home of
the ancestors of the Vedic bards. Another oint elucidated by
the present theory is the four-fold character of the effects of
Indra's conquest over Vṛitra, a point which has been entirely
neglected by ancient and modern Nairuktas, not because it was
unknown but because they were unable to give any satisfactory
explanation of the same, except on the hypothesis that differ-
ent effects have been confounded with one other by the poets
of the Ṛig-Veda. But the theory of the cosmic circulation of