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

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of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, has
mathematically worked out the statement in the Taittirîya Brâhmana
(III, 1, 1, 5), that Bṛihaspati, or the planet Jupiter, was first discovered
when confronting or nearly occulting the star Tishya, 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.
But if the age of the oldest Vedic period was thus carried back
to 4500 B.C., one was still tempted to ask whether we had, in that
limit, reached the Ultima Thule of the Aryan antiquity. For, as stated
by Prof. Bloomfield, while noticing my Orion in his address on the
occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of John Hopkin’s University,
“the language and literature of the Vedas is, by no means, so
primitive as to place with it the real beginnings of Aryan life.” “These
in all probability and in all due moderation,” he rightly observed,
“reach back several thousands of years more,” and it was, he said,
therefore “needless to point out that this curtain, which seems to shut
off our vision at 4500 B.C., may prove in the end a veil of thin gauze.”
I myself held the same view, and much of my spare time during the
last ten years has been devoted to the search of evidence which
would lift up this curtain and reveal to us the long vista of primitive
Aryan antiquity. How I first worked on the lines followed up in Orion,
how in the light of latest researches in geology and. archeology
bearing on the primitive history of man, I was gradually led to a
different line of search, and finally how the conclusion, that the
ancestors of the Vedic يishis lived in an Arctic home in inter-Glacial
times, was forced on me by the slowly accumulating mass of Vedic
and Avestic evidence, is fully narrated in the book, and need not,
therefore, be repeated in this place. I desire, however, to take this
opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the generous sympathy
shown to me at a critical time by that venerable scholar Prof. F. Max
Müller, whose recent death was mourned as a personal loss