THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS

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THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS

when it was warm/tropical, before the axis shift/deluge.

THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS

Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of
Many Vedic Texts and Legends

By
Lokamanya Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak

Poona City, India, 1903

CONTENTS
Preface p. i – ix
Chapter I Prehistoric Times p. 1
Chapter II The Glacial Period p. 19
Chapter III The Arctic Regions p. 37
Chapter IV The Night of the Gods p. 57
Chapter V The Vedic Dawns p. 74
Chapter VI Long Day and Long Night p. 113
Chapter VII Months and Seasons p. 136
Chapter VIII The Cows’ Walk p. 173
Chapter IX Vedic Myths — The Captive Waters p. 216
Chapter X Vedic Myths — The Matutinal Deities p. 276
Chapter XI The Avestic Evidence p. 328
Chapter XII Comparative Mythology p. 364
Chapter XIII The Bearing of Our Results on the History of Primitive Aryan Culture and Religion p. 385
. Index p. 433

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PREFACE
The present volume is a sequel to my Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, published in 1893. The estimate of Vedic antiquity then generally current amongst Vedic scholars was based on the assignment of arbitrary period of time to the different strata into which the Vedic literature is divided; and it was believed that the oldest of these strata could not, at the best, be older than 2400 B.C. In my Orion, however, I tried to show that all such estimates, besides being too modest, were vague and uncertain, and that the astronomical statements found in the Vedic literature supplied us with far more reliable data for correctly ascertaining the ages of the different periods of Vedic literature. These astronomical statements, it was further shown, unmistakably pointed out that the Vernal equinox was in the constellation of Mṛiga or Orion (about 4500 B.C.) during the period of the Vedic hymns, and that it had receded to the constellation of the Kṛittikâs, or the Pleiades (about 2500 B.C.) in the days of the Brâhmaṇas. Naturally enough these results were, at first, received by scholars in a skeptical spirit. But my position was strengthened when it was found that Dr. Jacobi, of Bonn, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, and, soon after, scholars like Prof. Bloomfield, M. Barth, the late Dr. Bulher and others, more or less freely, acknowledged the force of my arguments. Dr. Thibaut, the late Dr. Whitney and a few others were, however, of opinion that the evidence adduced by me was not conclusive. But the subsequent discovery, by my friend the late Mr. S. B. Dixit, of a passage in the Shatapatha Brâhmaṇa, plainly stating that the Kṛittikâs never swerved, in those days, from the due east i.e., the Vernal equinox, has served to dispel all lingering doubts regarding the age of the Brâhmaṇas; while another Indian astronomer, Mr. V. B. Ketkar, in a recent number of the Journal


ii
of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, has mathematically worked out the statement in the Taittirîya Brâhmaṇa (III, 1, 1, 5), that Bṛihaspati, or the planet Jupiter, was first discovered when confronting or nearly occulting the star Tiṣhya, and shown that the observation was possible only at about 4650 B.C., thereby remarkably confirming my estimate of the oldest period of Vedic literature. After this, the high antiquity of the oldest Vedic period may, I think, be now taken as fairly established.


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