The Arctic Home in the Vedas c8.43.4

c8.43.4

and the same term is used in the Taittirîya Saṃhitâ with reference to ‘thirty sisters’. The word *yojana* primarily means ‘a chariot’ (VIII, 72, 6), and then it came to denote ‘a distance to be accomplished without unharnessing the horses’, or what we, in the vernacular, call a ‘*ṭappâ*.’ Now this *ṭappâ*, or ‘the journey to be accomplished without unharnessing the horses’, may be a day’s journey, and Prof. Max Muller has in one place interpreted the word *yojana* in this way.¹ In V, 54, 5, the Maruts are said “to have extended their greatness as far as the sun extends his daily course,” and the word in the original for ‘daily course’ is *yojanam*. Accepting this meaning, we can interpret the expression ‘the dawns forthwith go round (*pari yanti*) thirty yojanas’ to mean that the dawns complete thirty daily rounds as at the North Pole. That circular motion is here intended is further evident from III, 61, 3, which says, in distinct terms, “Wending towards the same goal (*samânam artham*), O Newly-born (Dawn)! turn on like a wheel (*chakram iva â vavṛtsva*).”² Although the word *navyasi* (newly-born) is here in the vocative case, yet the meaning is that the dawn, ever anew or becoming new every day, revolves like a wheel. Now a wheel may either move in a perpendicular plane, like the wheel of a chariot, or in a horizontal plane like the potter's wheel. But the first of these two motions can not be predicated of the dawn anywhere on the surface of the earth.