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

120
solar and the lunar year was solved with sufficient accuracy Sâyana’s
explanation of winter nights causing misgivings about the coming
dawn must, therefore, be rejected as unsatisfactory. It was not the
long winter-night that the Vedic bards were afraid of in former ages. It
was something else, something very long, so long that, though you
knew it would not last permanently, yet, by its very length, it tired your
patience and made you long for, eagerly long for, the coming dawn.
In short, it was the long night of the Arctic region, and the word purâ
shows that it was a story of former ages, which the Vedic bards knew
by tradition, I have shown elsewhere that the Taittirîya Samhitâ must
be assigned to the Kṛittikâ period. We may, therefore, safely conclude
that at about 2500 B.C., there was a tradition current amongst the
Vedic people to the effect that in former times, or rather in the former
age, the priests grew so impatient of the length of the night, the
yonder boundary of which was not known, that they fervently prayed
to their deities to guide them safely to the other end of that tiresome
darkness. This description of the night is inappropriate unless we take
it to refer to the long and continuous Arctic night.
Let us now see if the يig-Veda contains any direct reference to
the long day, the long night, or to the Circumpolar calendar, besides
the expressions about long darkness or the difficulty of reaching the
other boundary of the endless night noticed above. We have seen
before that the Rig-Vedic calendar is a calendar of 360 days, with an
intercalary month, which can neither be Polar nor Circumpolar. But
side by side with it the يig-Veda preserves the descriptions of days
and nights, which are not applicable to the cis-Arctic days, unless we
put an artificial construction upon the passages containing these
descriptions. Day and night is spoken of as a couple in the Vedic
literature, and is denoted by a compound word in the dual number.
Thus we have Ushâsa-naktâ (I, 122, 2), Dawn and Night; Naktoshâsâ
(I, 142, 7), Night and Dawn; or simply Ushâsau (I, 188, 6) the two
Dawns; all meaning a couple of Day and Night. The word