Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 2 of 3: or the Central and Western Rajput States of IndiaTod, James
History
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 2 of 3: or the Central and Western Rajput States of India
Tod, James
Rajasthan (India) -- History; Rajput (Indic people) -- History
The more we attend to the warlike mythology of the north, the more
apparent is its analogy with that of the Rajputs, and the stronger
ground is there for assuming that both races inherited their creed from
the common land of the Yuti of the Jaxartes. What is a more proper
etymon for Scandinavian, the abode of the warriors who destroyed the
Roman power, than Skanda, the Mars or Kumara of the Rajputs? perhaps the
origin of the Cimbri, derived by Mallet from koempfer, ‘to fight.’
Thor, in the eleventh fable of the Edda, is denominated
Asa-Thor,[4.21.19] the ‘lord Thor,’ called the Celtic Mars by the
Romans. The chariot of Thor is ignobly yoked compared with the car of
Surya; but in the substitution of the he-goats for the seven-headed
horse Saptasva we have but the change of an adjunct depending on clime,
when the Yuti migrated from the plains of Scythia, of which the horse is
a native, to Yutland, of whose mountains the goat was an inhabitant
prior to any of the race of Asi. The northern warrior makes the palace
of the sun-god Thor the most splendid of the celestial abodes, “in which
are five hundred and forty halls”: vying with the Suryamandala, the
supreme heaven of the Rajput. Whence such notions of the Aswa races of
the Ganges, and the Asi of Scandinavia, but from the Scythic Saka, who
adored the solar divinity under the name of ‘Gaeto-Syrus,’[4.21.20] the
Surya of the Sachha Rajput; and as, according to the commentator on the
Edda, “the ancient people of the north pronounced the _th_ as the
English now do _ss_,” the sun-god _Thor_ becomes _Sor_, and is
identified still more with Surya whose worship no doubt gave the name to
that extensive portion of Asia called Συρία, as it did to the small
peninsula of the Sauras, still peopled by tribes of Scythic origin. The
Sol of the Romans has probably the same Celto-Etrurian origin; with
those tribes the sun was the great object of adoration, and their grand
festival, the winter solstice, was called Yule, Hiul, Houl, “which even
at this day signifies the Sun, in the language of Bas-Bretagne and
Cornwall.”[4.21.21] On the conversion of the descendants of these
Scythic Yeuts, who, according to [565] Herodotus, sacrificed the horse
(_Hi_) to the sun (_El_), the name of the Pagan jubilee of the solstice
was transferred to the day of Christ’s nativity, which is thus still
held in remembrance by their descendants of the north.[4.21.22]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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