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

378 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
cold climate; but in the present instance the climate of the
Airyana Vaêjo was mild and genial before the invasion of
Angra Mainyu, and we must, therefore, suppose that the Iranian
table-land was not elevated at first, until Angra Mainyu upheaved
it and produced a cold climate. But the present altitude of the
plateau is not so great as to produce a winter of ten months,
and this requires us again to assume the submergence of this
land after the invasion of Angra Mainyu. Unfortunately there is
no geological evidence forth-coming to support the upheaval and
submergence of this land in the order mentioned above. But
even if such evidence were forthcoming, the explanation would
still fail to account why the inhabitants of Yima's Vara in the
Airyana Vaêjo regarded a year as a single day, a description,
which is true only at the North Pole. All attempts to locate
the primitive Airyana Vaêjo in a region other than the
circumpolar country must, therefore, be abandoned. The names
of mythical rivers and countries may have been transferred in
later times to real terrestrial rivers and provinces; but if we were
to settle the position of the primitive rivers or countries by a
reference to these new names, we can as well locate the Airyana
Vaêjo between the Himâlay and the Vindhya mountains in
India, for in later Sanskrit literature the land lying between these
two mountains is called the Âryâvarta or the abode of the Aryans.
The mistake committed by Darmesteter and Spiegel is of the
same kind. Instead of determining the position of the Airyana
Vaêjo from the fact that a winter of ten months is said to have
been introduced therein by Angra Mainyu, and that a year seemed
only as a day to the inhabitants thereof, they have tried to guess
it from the uncertain data furnished by the names of rivers in Iran,
though they were aware of the fact that these names were origi-
nally the names of mythical rivers and were attached to the
real rivers in Iran only in later times, when a branch of the