The Arctic Home in the Vedas c8.32

c8.32

The case is, therefore, reduced to this. The word *ahan*, of which *ahâni* (days) is a plural form, can be ordinarily interpreted to mean (1) a period of time between sunrise and sunset; (2) a nycthemeron, as when we speak of 360 days of the year; or (3) a measure of time to mark a period of 24 hours, irrespective of the fact whether the sun is above or below the horizon, as when we speak of the long Arctic night of 30 days. Are we then to abandon all these meanings, and understand *ahâni* to mean ‘splendours’ in the verse under consideration? The only difficulty is to account for the interval of many days between the appearance of the banner of the Dawn on the horizon and the emergence of the sun’s orb over it; and this difficulty vanishes if the description be taken to refer to the dawn in the Polar or Circum-Polar regions. That is the real key to the meaning of this and similar other passages, which will be noted hereafter; and in its absence a number of artificial devices have been made use of to make these passages somehow intelligible to us. But now nothing of the kind is necessary. As regards the word ‘days,’ it has been observed that we often speak ‘a night of several days,’ or ‘a night of several months’ when describing the Polar phenomena. In expressions like these the word ‘day’ or ‘month’ simply denotes a measure of time, equivalent to ‘twenty-four hours,’ or ‘thirty days;’ and there is nothing unusual in the exclamation of the Rig-Vedic poet that “many were the days between the first beams of the dawn and actual sunrise.” We have also seen that, at the Pole, it is quite possible to mark the periods of twenty-four hours by the rotations of the celestial sphere or the circum-polar stars, and these could be or rather must have been termed ‘days’ by the inhabitants of the place. In the first chapter of the Old Testament we are told that God created the heaven and the earth and also light "on the first day;" while the sun was created on the fourth "to divide the day from the night and to rule the day." Here the word 'day' is used to denote a period of time even before the sun was created; and, *a fortiori*, there can be no impropriety in using it to denote a period of time before sunrise. We need not, therefore, affect a hypercritical spirit in examining the Vedic expression in question. If Sâyaṇa did it, it was because he did not know as much about the Polar regions as we now do. We have no such excuse, and must, therefore, accept the meaning which follows from the natural construction and reading of the sentence.