As I have been saying in these pages previously, astronomical phenomena and observations were encoded to complexly woven stories and attached to other major works (such as the various Puranas, the Mahabharata or the Ramayana or the Harivamsha Kavya, or Yogavasishta) for dual purposes - saving them for perpetuity, as well as making them easier to remember.
And the method worked! Although, only to a certain extent. While the stories have been preserved, we forgot to decode them and treated them as 'myths', not realizing they were clues to something bigger, not only in terms of the phenomenon itself in question, but also towards pinning them to a point in time.
Only with recent advancements and refinements in the understanding of celestial dynamics and planetary software have two completely diverse fields of study come together to produce some gems that we are finally able to decode. The results are mind-boggling in content and mind-blowing in reach.
Here's one such, rooted in the Rigveda and expounded in the Puranas.
Rigveda 10.17.1 and 10.17.2 say:
त्वष्टा दुहित्रे वह्तुं कृणॊतीतीदं विश्वं भुवनं समॆति
यमस्य माता पर्युह्यमाना महॊ जाया विवस्वतो ननाश ||1||
अपागूहन्नमृतां मर्त्येभ्यः कृत्वी सवर्णामददुर्विवस्वते
उताश्चिनावभरद्यत्तदासीदजहादु द्वा मिथुना सरण्यूः ||2||
The simple translation of works out as:
Tvashtri celebrates the wedding of his daughter (Saranyu) and the entire world assembles for the wedding, but she (Saranyu, Yama's mother, spouse of Vivasvan i.e Surya), vanished.
The Devas hid this fact from the mortals and in her (Saranyu's) stead created another (person) in her likeness and presented her to Vivasvan. Saranyu brought to him two sets of twins: the Ashvin brothers, as well as Yama and Yami.
धॆनुः प्रत्नस्य काम्यं दुहानांतः पुत्रश्चरति दक्षिणायाःआ द्यॊतनिं वहति शुभ्रयामॊषसः स्तॊमॊ अश्विनावजीगः
Ushas (the deity of dawn), provides the desired milk (strength) to Agni (the deity of fire). As Surya traverses the sky, Ushas awakens the Ashvins for their share of the (fruit of) Yajna.
On the face of it, this sounds like a good story, but essentially in the larger scheme of things a pointless story, until we decrypt the code and get to the facts. Remember, the story is an allegory to real/observed phenomena - especially as it relates to known celestial objects.
The key here is the coming together of the two stories of the Ashvins from the third and tenth mandalas. One awakens a baby, or a child, on the basis of that, the birth of the Ashvin-twins and this awakening can be tied together (if they were unconnected, it might, for instance, have been said that 'Ushas invites the Ashvins to share the fruit of yajna'; that isn't the case however - the Veda are Darshana Shastras, hence it is critical to make these connections). Esteemed freedom fighter Balgangadhar Tilak was the first one in modern times to identify this phenomenon.
While the descriptions by Ralph Griffith, HP Venkata Rao and the Sayana bhashya all differ in the explanations of 3.58.1, the bottom line appears to be that Ashvins appear at dawn. This is the only piece relevant to our discussion. The Ashvins (a.k.a Ashvini Nakshatra) are conventionally mapped to the stars β and γ Arietis in western astronomy.
Meanwhile, Surya went to cooler regions in search of Sanjana (who had previously gone over to 'cooler regions' in the first place), therefore it must be Winter (in earth's Northern Hemisphere, since the geographical basis is, of course, Bharat (India)) - specifically Winter Solstice - with a quick reminder of spatial cardinal points here (the two solstices and the two equinoxes)
So, cranking back time to a point where β and γ Arietis appear in the sky at dawn around Winter Solstice in the Northern hemisphere, the calendar goes back to..... 7200 BCE.
Okay - we're not (just) discussing the antiquity of the Veda, astronomical observations and dating methods here. What about Surya being too bright, Sanjana migrating to cooler regions and the rest? Can we find some other corroborations to this celestial observation date?
Two papers in the journal Nature in recent years provide an independent corroboration of sorts: These papers indicated a massive Solar flare activity ~9000 years BP (~7176 BCE). If a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) event were to occur, resulting in a concentration of charged solar particles in the inner solar system, and if these hit the earth, they get pushed to the poles because of earth's magnetic field, and end up interacting with earth atmosphere resulting in the Auroras Borealis and Australis - a.k.a Northern lights. At such times, specific isotopes/particles rain down on the earth and eventually get buried in the ice becoming a part of the ice caps, which is how the authors of the paper hypothesized a large CME event.
If the CME event is severe and earth sees a heavy concentration of these charged solar particles (such as in the Carrington event of 1859), the Auroras - Borealis and Australis - can reach to much lower altitudes - such as those in Northern India, and the sky is lit up with these particles and their interactions even at night. The 7176 BCE CME event is estimated an order of magnitude larger than the Carrington event as evidenced by ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica.
Now things start to come together. Surya became too brilliant/bright for a while - the 7176 CME event leading to Auroras at very low latitudes, Sanjana migrated to "cooler regions" and was followed by Surya, i.e this happened around the Winter Solstice. The Ashvin twins were born during this time - the Indian astronomers/sages put a further identification around this with the Ashvini nakshatra at dawn, yielding a date of 7200BCE to modern researchers.
Whew! Mind blown!
Initial trigger for kickstarting this article: Raj Vedam's podcast on BeerBiceps
Reference:
Cosmogenic radionuclides reveal an extreme solarparticle storm near a solar minimum 9125 years BP Chiara I. Paleari Florian Mekhaldi, Florian Adolphi, Marcus Christl, Christof Vockenhuber, Philip Gautschi, Jürg Beer, Nicolas Brehm, Tobias Erhardt, Hans-Arno Synal, Lukas Wacker, Frank Wilhelms & Raimund Muscheler
