The Arctic Home in the Vedas c4.28

Language: English

c4.28.1

But though recent discoveries have brought to light these facts about the human races inhabiting Europe in prehistoric times, and though we may, in accordance with them, assume that one of the four early Neolithic races represented the primitive Aryans in Europe, the question whether the latter were autochthonous, or went there from some other place and then succeeded in Aryanising the European races by their superior culture and civilisation, cannot be regarded as settled by these discoveries. The date assigned to the Neolithic period as represented by Swiss lake-dwellers is not later than 5000 B. C., a time when Asiatic Aryans were probably settled on the Jaxartes; and it is admitted that the primitive Aryans in Europe could not have been the descendants of the Palæolithic man. It follows, therefore, that if we discover them in Europe in the early Neolithic times they must have gone there from some other part of the globe. The only other alternative is to assume that one of the four Neolithic races in Europe developed a civilisation quite independently of their neighbours, an assumption, which is improbable on its face. Although, therefore, we may, in the light of recent scientific discoveries, give up the theory of successive migrations into Europe from a common home of the Aryan race in Central Asia in early times, yet the question of the primeval home of the Aryan race, a question with which we are mainly concerned in this book, still remains unsolved.

c4.28.2

When and where the primitive Aryan tongue was developed is again another difficult question which is not satisfactorily answered. Canon Taylor, after comparing the Aryan and Ural-Altaic languages, hazards a conjecture that at the close of the reindeer, or the last period of the Palæolithic age, a Finnic people appeared in Western Europe, whose speech remaining stationary is represented by the agglutinative Basque, and that much later, at the beginning of the pastoral age, when the ox had been tamed, a taller and more powerful Finno-Ugric people developed in Central Europe the inflexive Aryan speech.¹ But this is merely a conjecture, and it does not answer the question how the Indo-Iranians with their civilisation are found settled in Asia at a time when Europe was in the Neolithic age. The Finnic language again discloses a number of culture words borrowed from the Aryans, and it is unlikely that the language of the latter could have got its inflection from the Finnic language. A mere similarity of inflectional structure is no evidence whatsoever for deciding who borrowed from whom, and it is surprising that the above suggestion should come from scholars, who have assailed the theory of successive Aryan migrations from a common Asiatic home, a theory which, amongst others, was based on linguistic grounds. Why did the Finns twice migrate from their home is also left unexplained.

c4.28.3

For reasons like these it seems to me more probable that the Finns might have borrowed the culture words from the Aryans when they came in contact with them, and that the Aryans were autochthonous neither in Europe nor in Central Asia, but had their original home somewhere near the North Pole in the Palæolithic times, and that they migrated from this place southwards in Asia and Europe, not by any ‘irresistible impulse,’ but by unwelcome changes in the climatic conditions of their original home. The Avesta preserves traditions which fully support this view. But these have been treated as valueless by scholars, who worked up their theories at a time when man was regarded as post-glacial, and the Avestic traditions were, it was believed, not supported by any Vedic authority. But with the time-telescope of a wider range supplied to us by recent scientific discoveries it has become possible to demonstrate that the Avestic traditions represent a real historical fact and that they are fully supported by the testimony of the Vedas. The North Pole is already considered by several eminent scientific men as the most likely place where plant and animal life first originated; and I believe it can be satisfactorily shown that there is enough positive evidence in the most ancient books of the Aryan race, the Vedas and the Avesta, to prove that the oldest home of the Aryan people was somewhere in regions round about the North Pole.

c4.28.4

I shall take up this evidence after examining the climatic conditions of the Pleistocene or the Glacial period and the astronomical characteristics of the Arctic regions in the next two chapters.