Page 24 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

SACRIFICE ALIAS THE YEAR 11
the oldest records and traditions of ali' the sections of the Aryan
race. Without a yearly satra regularly kept up a Vedic '-i~hi could
hardly have been able to ascertain and measure the course of time
in the way he did. When better contrivances were subsequently
.<Jiscovered the sacrifice might naturally become divested of their
... time-keeping function and the differentiation so caused might have
ultimately led to an independent development of both the sacrifices
.and the calendar. It is to this stage that we must assign the in-
troduction of the numerous details of the yearly sacrifice men-
tioned in later works; and thus understood, the idea of a sacrifice
.extending over the whole year may be safely supposed to have
.originated in the oldest days of the history of the Aryan race, •
In fact, it may be regarded as coeval with, if not antecedent to,
·the very beginning of the calendar itself.
We have now to examine the principal parts of the ¥ear, alias
the sacrifice. The savana or the civil day appears to have been, as
its etymology shows,t selected in such cases as the natural
unit of time. 30 such days made a month and 12 such months or
360 savana days made a year.:j: Comparative Philology, however,
shews that the names for the month and the moon coincide, with
.occasional small differences of suffix,§ in most of the Indo-
European languages, and we may therefore conclude that in the
primitive Aryan times the month was determined by the moon.
Now a month of thirty civil or savana days cannot correspond with
a lunar synodical month, and the Brahmav~dins had therefore to
.omit a day in some of the savona months to secure the concurrence

• Comparative Philology also points to the same conclusion; Cf.
Sanskrit 3'aj, Zand yaj, Greek agos. lt is well-known that the sacrificial
system obtain amongst the Greeks, the Romans and the Iranians.
t St'Zvana is derived from su to sacrifice, and means Ji terally a
sacrificial day.
t Ait. Br. ii. 17; Taitt. Sa~. ii, 5, 8, 3; ~ig. i. 164. 48. Prof.
Whitney (Sur. Sid. r 3, 11) observes. " The civil ( s:Wa11a) day is the
natural day ... A month of 30 and a year of 360 days are supposed to
have formed the basis of the earliest Hindu Chronology, an inter,::alary
'lllontb being added once in five years."
§ See Dr. Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples,
Yart iv, Chap. vi. Translation by Jevoos, p. ao6. Also Max Muller's
Biographies of Words, p. 193.