Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

66 страница из 76

Exactly the same process recurs in the Indian seasons. The natural division of the North Indian year is into three periods—a warm, a rainy, and a cold season. Three corresponding seasons are the most usual in the Vedic period, and these are still the popular divisions in the Punjab. Later two transitional periods are interpolated, one of an autumnal character between the rainy season and the cold season, and a warm period between the cold season and the hot. These five seasons often occur in the Brahmanas. The well-known six seasons—vasanta, spring; grishma, hot season; varsha, rainy season; śarad, autumn; hemanta, winter; śiśira, cool season: the cold season is divided into two periods—are the result of a systematic comparison with the months, the latter being distributed in pairs among the seasons. By this arrangement the rainy season is the loser, since it embraces at least three months. There is also a second sexpartite division of the year, not indeed mentioned in the Vedic literature but better corresponding to the course of the seasons, in which the rainy season is divided into two periods[324].