Artic Home of the Aryans by Lokamanya Bal ... - Mandhata Global

98
every twenty-four hours. All these passages taken together,
therefore, point only to one conclusion and that is that both the يig-
Veda and the Taittirîya Samhitâ describe a long and continuous dawn
divided into thirty dawn-days, or periods of twenty four hours each, a
characteristic found only in the Polar dawn.
There are a number of other passages where the dawn is
spoken of in the plural, especially in the case of matutinal deities, who
are said to follow or come after not a single dawn but dawns in the
plural (I, 6, 3; I, 180, 1; V, 76, 1; VII, 9, 1; VII, 63, 3). These passages
have been hitherto understood as describing the appearance of the
deities after the consecutive dawns of the year. But now a new light is
thrown upon them by the conclusion established above from the
examination of the different passages about the dawn in the يig-
Veda, the Taittirîya and the Atharva Veda Samhitâ. It may, however,
be mentioned that I do not mean to say that in the whole of the يig-
Veda not a single reference can be found to the dawn of the tropical
or the temperate zone. The Veda which mentions a year of 360 days
is sure to mention the evanescent dawn which accompanies these
days in regions to the south of the Arctic circle. A greater part of the
description of the dawn is again of such a character that we can apply
it either to the long Polar dawn, or to the short-lived dawn of the
tropics. Thus both may be said to awaken every living being (I, 92, 9,)
or disclose the treasures concealed by darkness (I, 123, 4). Similarly
when dawns of different days are said to depart and come, a new
sister succeeding each day to the sister previously vanished (I, 124,
9), we my either suppose that the consecutive dawns of different
days are intended, or that a number of day-long dawns, which
succeed one another after every 24 hours at the Pole, were in the
mind of the poet. These passages do not, therefore, in any way affect
the conclusion we have arrived at above by the consideration of the
special characteristics of the dawns mentioned in the hymns. What
we mean to prove is that Ushas, or the Goddess of the first
appearance of which formed the subject of so many