Gérard Fussman Quotes

806 Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

811-2 Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

It is perhaps worth emphasizing that the enormous academic literature devoted in Europe, over the past one hundred and fifty years, to the Indo-European question, even disregarding pan-Germanist and Nazi rantings, often contains preconceptions and paralogisms which are equivalent to those of Indian semi-scientists. Among the Western scholars who take part today in the debates on the Indo-Europeans, I know some whose erudition is not enough to compensate for the falsity of mind and others whose outdated erudition serves to perpetuate theses the lightness or impossibility of which they have been shown a hundred times.

But it is clear that, on this point, my attitude owes a lot to acquired habits and to the fact that, for one hundred and fifty years, hundreds of European and American scientists, sometimes very brilliant, have established as a principle of interpretation of all the facts that PIE was, geographically speaking, a European language. I have no doubt that such an effort would make it possible to reinterpret all the data in a sense compatible with the thesis of the Indian origin of the PIE. The resulting diagram would undoubtedly be more complex than the diagram traditionally taught in Europe, but we know that the simplest interpretations are not necessarily those which best reflect the reality of the facts.

The sacrifice of horses, in fact, is in no way specific to Vedic India: only the ritual of this sacrifice is, very different from that of the funerary ritual of Sintashta. The Indian aśvamedha is in no way a funeral ritual.

No trace either of the skillful turned pottery of the Oxus civilization: the vases used by the Vedic priests are made of wood or unturned ceramic. The black ceramics from Swat attributed to the Āryas, the gray ceramics (PGW, Painted Gray Ware), which Indian archaeologists consider as the best marker of their presence in the Indus and Ganges valleys, do not in any way recall what is found in Togolok or Gonur.

In short, the Iranians perhaps (if they did not penetrate into Iran through the Caucasus), the Proto-Indo-Aryans certainly crossed the territories of the Oxus civilization without having left any traces and, it seems, without having been influenced by this sedentary and proto-urban civilization.

Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 19th century, Westerners have agreed to place the habitat of the p-i-e-speaking people(s) in central or eastern Europe, more rarely in Scandinavia, in any case not in Iran, nor in India...
European historians, who all considered it proven that the existence of languages of indo-european origin in India resulted from a movement of peoples from the North, could be content to draw large arrows on the maps representing the archaeologically empty territories where they had necessarily passed before crossing the Hindu-Kush barrier and penetrating into North-West India. It now appears that these territories were populated, urbanized and linked together by a complex network of commercial and cultural relations. Archaeologists then find themselves faced with the classic problem of having to correlate a material culture and a language.

Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813. p. 802

p. 802-3 Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

p 812 Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

Unfortunately, E. E. Kuzmina, whose archaeological knowledge is very vast, uses Indian sources in very outdated translations and knows neither how to criticize them nor how to scale them over time: Indian civilization is not immutable.

807 Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

p. 805 (footnote) Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

This is not the place to dwell on these debates, as important as they are. We will find a good overview in the very well informed and very balanced book by Edwin Bryant which, moreover, demonstrates that, all things considered, no scientific argument allows us to choose between the theses of Indian or extra-Indian origin of the Āryas and, consequently, of the Indo-Europeans... To anyone who doubts the fact that the commonly accepted opinion in the West on the origin of i-e language peoples is based primarily on an intuition that is difficult to demonstrate, I would recommend reading E. Bryant's book. We can clearly see that the debate resurfaces from generation to generation.