About a century ago Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his book named Orion, tried to date Rigveda and other Vedic scriptures, by using positions of the sun against star asterisms, at a given season. He understood these sun positions keep changing all the time because of the precession motion of the earth around its axis. I feel that the time has come to revisit this topic, primarily because of one reason. The reason for this re-look is the successful decipherment of the ancient Indus script in 2024 by a person, who calls himself as Yajnadevam. He is an IT specialist and has great proficiency in Sanskrit and Mathematics. According to me, his find should be called the biggest discovery of 2024, in the Indian context. We can certainly presume his decipherment to be correct, as no one so far has been able to falsify it. Yajnadevam’s major finding is that the IVC language is none other than Vedic Sanskrit and IVC script is the great grandmother of Bramhi, our ancient script. What Yajnadevam has found further, is equally breathtaking. In many cases the texts found on IVC seals and tablets include quotes and words from our oldest scripture, Rigveda. Yajnadevam’s discovery has one major implication for ancient Indian history. It pushes back the Vedic period by an unknown interval of time. Now the question before us is whether we can corroborate this possibility by any other evidence or method? Before we start our study and go back to the Vedic period, let me first clarify an important and confusing concept of ‘Rashis’ or ‘Signs of Zodiac’. For more details, I request you, my readers, to refer to my blogpost on this subject, ‘Who introduced Signs of The Zodiac to India?’. It should suffice to mention here, that the concept of ‘Rashis’ is a much later concept introduced in India, after arrival of Greeks, most probably by ‘King Menander’. Prior to that, we find no references in the scriptures to ‘Rashis”. There are references only to star asterisms, known in our scripturesas ‘Nakshatra’, that are positioned near ecliptic or path of the sun in the sky round a year. If we refer to any Hindu calendar or ‘Panchang’ today. We can easily find a list of 27 ‘Nakshatras’ or star asterisms. The first star asterism that is mentioned in this list today is ‘Ashvini’ (अश्विनी) or Aries, comprising of three stars, alpha, beta and gamma Ariets. Let us turn our attention now, to Two of our ancient scriptures, ‘Taittariya Sanhita of Krlshna Yajurveda’ and ‘Atharva Veda’, believed to be from Vedic period. Both have a ‘sukta’ or Hymn, known as ‘Nakshatra Sukta,’ which lists names of all the ‘Nakshatras’ or star asterisms that are seen along the Zodiac, or ecliptic. This list consists of 28 names instead of 27 mentioned intoday’s ‘Panchang’. The last star asterism mentioned in this list is that of‘Abhijit”. What is surprising here is that in both these ‘suktas’, thefirst star asterism mentioned is ‘Krittika’ (कृत्तिका)or Pleiades instead of ‘Ashvini’ (अश्विनी), as is done today. A question arises naturally, as to Why does this list begin with Pleiades, instead of Aries, as it is done today? Obviously, there must be a reason. A simplistic reason for that could probably be that, when this Hymn was composed, Pleiades was the first asterism, the sun crossed, when the new crop cycle or a solar year began. But things may not be that simple. Here we come across our first difficulty. As we just saw above, the Vedic calendar system depended on the sidereal year, linking sun’s position against star asterisms, whereas a crop cycle depended on three principal seasons observed in semi tropical India. Namely Summer, Rains and Winter. To align these two cycles, the Vedic calendar had to begin near about one of the four marker days of a solar year. Any school going lad would tell us that these marker days are obviously Spring equinox, summer solstice, Autumn equinox and winter solstice. If we agree with that, we n...
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