The Arctic Home in the Vedas c14.29

Language: English

c14.29.1

It is again a question why Rangha should be identified with the Caspian Sea, or some western river in Iran. The Fargard does not say anything about the situation of Rangha. It simply states that the fifteenth land created by Ahura Mazda was Hapta Heṇdu, and the sixteenth was on the floods of Rangha. Now if Hapta Heṇdu is identified with Sapta Sindhu, or the Panjaub, why take a big and a sudden jump from the Panjaub to the Caspian Sea, to find out the Rangha river. Rangha is Sanskrit Rasâ, and in the Rig-Veda (X, 75, 6) a terrestrial river, by name Rasâ, is mentioned along with the Kubhâ, the Krumu and the Gomatî, which are all known to be the affluents of the Indus. Is it not, therefore, more likely that Rangha may be the Vedic Rasâ, a tributary of the Indus? If the context is any guide to the determination of the sense of ambiguous words, the mention of Hapta Heṇdu, as the fifteenth land, shows that Rasâ the sixteenth must be sought for somewhere near it, and the point is pretty well settled when we find Rasâ actually mentioned in the Rig-Veda along with some other tributaries of the Indus. The identification of Rangha with the westernmost river is, therefore, at best doubtful, and the same may be said of Vanguhi, which by-the-by is not mentioned in the Fargard at all. But Darmesteter's reasoning does not stop here.

c14.29.2

On the strength of this doubtful identification he would have us believe that the ancient land of the Airyana Vaêjo was situated in the same region where the river named Vanguhi, or Vêh, in later times was said to flow. But the reasoning is obviously erroneous. The names of the two rivers Vanguhi and Rangha in the primeval home may have been subsequently transferred to the real rivers in the new settlement; but we cannot infer therefrom that the country through which these *new* rivers flowed was the original site of the Airyana Vaêjo. It is a well-known fact that persons migrating from their motherland to new countries often name the places they come across after the names of places familiar to them in their motherland. But on that account no one has ventured to place England in America or Australia; and it is strange how such a mistake should have been committed by Zend scholars in the present case. For even if a province or country in Central Asia had been named Airyana Vaêjo, we could not have located the original home in that province; just as the abode of Varuṇa cannot be placed in the land named Varena, which is the Zend equivalent of Varuṇa. The whole of Darmesteter's reasoning must, therefore, be rejected as unsound and illogical, and but for the preconceived notion that the original home of the Iranians cannot be placed in the far north, I think no scholar would have cared to put forward such guesses.

c14.29.3

There are express passages in the Avesta, which describe in unmistakable terms the climatic characteristics of the Airyana Vaêjo, and so far as I am aware, no valid reason has yet been assigned why we should treat this description as mythical and have recourse to guess-work for determining the position of the primeval home. Thus at the beginning of the first Fargard, we are told that the Airyana Vaêjo was the first good and happy creation of Ahura Mazda, but Angra Mainyu converted it into a land of ten months winter and two months summer, evidently meaning that at the time when the Fargard was composed it was an ice-bound land. The winter of ten months’ duration, therefore, naturally points to a position in the far north, at a great distance beyond the Jaxartes; and it would be unreasonable to ignore this description which is characteristic only of the Arctic regions, and, relying on doubtful guesses, hold that the Airyana Vaêjo was the easternmost boundary of the ancient Iran. As the passage, where the ten months’ winter is described as the present principal climatic characteristic of the Airyana Vaêjo, is very important for our purpose, I give below the translations of the same by Darmesteter, Spiegel and Haug:—