Page 648 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

VEDIC CHRONOLOGY

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The ancient Indian literature is divided into two sections-
Vedic and post-Vedic--and the chronological sequence of events
in the latter can now be pretty accurately determined by referring
to the date of Buddha, the invasion of Alexander the Great, the
inscriptions of Ashoka, the Shaka era, and a number of other
archaeological facts recently discovered. But when we go back
to the Vedic literature, the oldest portions of which admittedly
depict the most ancient Aryan civilization of which any records
have been left, we find no such land-marks; and in their absence
the method at first adopted by Western Sanskrit Scholar to ascer-
tain the antiquity of the Vedic Civilization was necessarily vague
and arbitrary. On the face of it the Vedic literature is divided into
four strata or layers-Chhandas Mantra, BnihmaiJ.a, and Sutra;
and it is evident that each of these tages of development must have
lasted, at least for a few centuries before it passed into the next.
Taking, therefore, these layers for the basis of his calculation,
and as uming, at the lowest, 200 year for each stage of develop-
ment, Prof. Max Muller, in his HlSTORY OF ANCIE T SA s~lT
LITERATURE, roughly fixed the age of Vedic civilization at 800
years before Buddha, or at 1200 B. C. The moderation here exhi-
bited, was no doubt unobjectionable, even from a sceptical point
of view. But it hardly corresponded with facts; and many other
Vedic Scholars even then considered this estimate as too low, and
assigning 400 instead of 200 years for each successive stage of
development, carried back the antiquity of the Vedic culture to
2400 B. C. This was the general opinion about the antiquity of
the Vedic civilization before the publication of my ' Orion ' and
Dr. Jacobi's essay' on the age of the ~igveda, ' in 1893, in both
of which the antiquity is carried back to about 4500 B. C. on the
strength of astronomical statements contained in the Vedic litera-
ture.
Indian astronomy was one of the first subjects which attract-
ed the attention of Western Scholars after the existence of
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