The Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas c12.40.2

c12.40.2

while, if we suppose that the separation occurred at a considerably later date, a Greek writer in the fifth century before Christ would certainly have spoken of it as a recent event. Aristotle and Eudoxus have gone still further and placed the era of Zoroaster as much as 6000 to 5000 years before Plato. The number of years here given is evidently traditional, but we can at any rate infer from it this much that at the time of Aristotle (about 320 B. C.) Zoroaster was considered to have lived at a very remote period of antiquity; and if the era of Zoroaster is to be considered so old, *a fortiori*, the period of the Vedas must be older still. Then we have further to consider the fact that an epic poem was written in Greek in about 900 or 1000 B. C. The language of this epic is so unlike that of the Vedic hymns that we must suppose it to have been composed long time after the Greeks left their ancient home and travelled westward. It is not, therefore, at all improbable that they separated after the formation of the legends of Orion and before the vernal equinox was in the Kṛittikās, that is, between 3500 to 3000 B. C. Finally we can easily understand how the acutest and most learned of Indian theologians and scholars believed the Vedas to have come down to them from an unknown period of antiquity. A revelation need not necessarily be *anādi*, or without a beginning.