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

THE AVESTIC EVIDENCE. 383
Vendidad is especially important for our purpose. The Dawn-
hymns in the Ṛig-Veda supply us with the evidence of a long
continuous dawn of thirty days in the ancient home, and there
are passages in the Vedas which speak of a long continuous
night of six months or of shorter duration, and a year of seven
or ten months. It can also be shown that several Vedic myths
and deities bear an unmistakable stamp of their Arctic origin.
But, as stated before, in the whole Vedic literature there is
no passage which will enable us to determine the time when
the Polar regions were inhabited, or to ascertain the reason
why they were abandoned. For that purpose we drew upon
geology which has recently established the fact that the cli-
mate of the circumpolar regions, which is now so cold as to
render the land unsuited for human habitation, was mild and
genial before the last Glacial period. It followed, therefore,
that if the Vedic evidence pointed to an Arctic home, the fore-
fathers of the Aryan race must have lived therein not after
but before the last Glacial epoch. But the traditions preserved
in the Avesta dispense with the necessity of relying on geology
for this purpose. We have now direct traditional evidence
to shew (1) that the Airyana Vaêjo had originally a good cli-
mate, but Angra Mainyu converted it into a winter of ten and
a summer of two months. (2) that the Airyana Vaêjo was so
situated that the inhabitants of Yima's Vara therein regarded
the year only as a day, and saw the sun rise only once a
year, and (3) that the happy land was rendered uninhabitable
by the advent of a Glacial epoch which destroyed all life there-
in. It is true, that but for recent geological discoveries these
statements, howsoever plain and distinct, would have remained
unintelligible, or regarded as improbable by scholars, who
would have always tried, as Darmesteter has already done, to
put some artificial or unnatural construction upon these pas-
sages to render the same comprehensible to them. We cannot,
therefore, deny that we are indebted to these scientific