[To face p. 142.
It will be seen from the diagram that something more than two hours was the longest interval that, according to the presumed method of counting the Vedic year, elapsed between the appearance of α and β Arietis and of the sun above the horizon.
This astronomic interpretation accounts for the varying times noted in the hymns for the appearance of the Aswins. It also accounts, as it seems to me, for the general tone of the hymns, but as regards the long series of miraculous “protections” of the Aswins, accorded by them to many sick, aged, and decrepit personages, it does not at first sight account.
We have seen that Bergaigne and others have opined that the various miracles attributed to the Aswins are “anthropomorphized forms of solar phenomena,” and with this view the astronomic interpretation, when fully followed out to its logical end, agrees.
But at first sight we wonder how the sun at the beginning of the calendrical year could, in Vedic times, be described as in any way especially sick, aged, or decrepit.
3,000 B.C., when, as we have seen, the winter solstice was in Aquarius, the Indian calendrical and sidereal year, such as has been supposed, would have begun at its earliest a month and a half after the solstice.[78] The sun at the winter solstice, may be, and often is, described as pale, weak, sick and old; but at the beginning of a calendrical year, a month and a half after the solstice, the sun no longer could have been thought of as requiring the miraculous protection of the heralding Aswins.
[78] If the Hindu year were now counted from the new moon following instead of that preceding the sun’s arrival at the initial point of the Zodiac, owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the year would begin at earliest twenty-one days after the spring equinox. Since 3,000 B.C. the seasons have advanced by more than two months, as regards their position amongst the stars.
To help in solving this difficulty, recourse may again wisely be had to Babylonian astronomic lore. The fanciful legends regarding the Aswins, considered only by themselves, can scarcely yield a sufficiently firm foundation on which to build the far-reaching theory I now desire to bring forward concerning them; a theory on all fours with one I ventured some years ago to propound in reference to Babylonian astronomy, in a Paper entitled the “Accadian Calendar.”[79] It was there suggested that the probable date for the origin of that Calendar was about 6,000 B.C. The fact was pointed out that Aries, in the most ancient Accadian and Babylonian astronomical works, always appears as leader of the signs and of the year, and stress was laid on the unlikelihood that this constellation should have been chosen for this leading post at a date when the sun’s entry into it did not correspond with any one of the four well-marked natural divisions of the year, i.e. the solstices or equinoxes. But as on the cuneiform tablets Aries appears as leader long before the time when the sun sojourned in that constellation during the first month following the equinox, it was suggested that it was when the solstitial not the equinoctial point coincided with the first degree of Aries, that the Accadian calendrical scheme had first been drawn up; namely about 6,000 B.C.
[79] Proceedings of Society of Biblical Archæology, January 1892.
A corroboration of the view then put forward is to be drawn from a further study of the Accadian month names. The first three month names, in Accadian, referred, as scholars have pointed out, to the first three constellations of the Zodiac.