Top 15 Nikos Kazanas Quotes

I start with some literary evidence. RV 4.1.13 & 4. 2.16 the Angirases declare that their ancestors made sacrifices “here” atra, ie in Saptasindhu. 3.53.11 Sudās fought enemies prāk ‘east’, apāk ‘west’ and udāk ‘north’ only, but not south. So we have no Indoaryans coming from the north and driving natives southward. The movement here is from east westward (apāk) and from south northword (udāk)! M6.61.9,12: Sarasvatī, the Rivergoddess, spread all five tribes beyond the other seven sister-rivers as the sun spreads out the days – again, days and sunlight from the east! 7.6.3 Agni turned the unholy Dasyus from east to west –pūrvaś cakāra áparām! Notice – NOT SOUTH (avāk or nyāk).

I find it very difficult to think that I am dealing with a science fully grounded in the realities of language as we ordinarily know and use it. All these specialized terms, the artificial models, the reconstructions that exist in no known texts and cannot be verified and the endless hypotheses — they all seem to belong to a world of airy-fairy speculation.

But what of the Iranian name Haraxvaiti? This name appears in the first chapter of the Vidēvdād along with placenames Haetumant (=Helmand), Māuru or Margu (= Margiana), Bāxδī or dhri (=Bactria) etc and, of course, Haptahǝndu. Haraxvaiti means simply ‘one who has harah-’. But Harah̦ - or Harax- is a stem entirely isolated in Avestan: it has no cognates, no other related lexemes.... But nothing, not one cognate, in Avestan other than the lonely and pitiful *harah̦ -! Observe now two absurdities implicit in the Doctrine. The Iranians who stayed put in Iran lost their own root *har/*hǝrᵊ- or whatever and all derivatives, while the IAs who moved further away retained this thoroughbred IE root and all its ramifications. And then they gave the name Sarasvatī (with the change of ha > sa) not to a large river like the Indus but to a dried-up stream in memory of the Haraxvaiti in Arachosia!

Saptasindhu as the name of the ancient region of the Seven Rivers in N-W India and Pakistan - countries which did not exist at that period. I use it as a bahuvrīhi, as many others have done before me, although in the RV we find references only to the Seven Rivers saptá síndhavaḥ (and different oblique cases of the plural). Now (e6) Avestan has the name Haptahǝndu as a place, like Airyana Vaējah, Raŋhā, Haetumant, etc, from which the Iranians had passed before settling down in eastern Iran, then spreading west and north. But what is this name? Yes, hapta- is the numeral ‘seven’ but what of hǝndhu? It is a fairly obvious Avestan correspondence to the Sanskrit síndhu. Now hǝndu is an isolated occurrence. The stem does not otherwise exist in Avestan. Hindu appears in Old Persian indicating the Indian province under the Achaemenids, and that is all. The interpretation ‘seven rivers’ comes from the Sanskrit collocation. But the Avestan for river is usually θraotah- (=S srotas) and raodah-.... Surely nobody would be so foolhardy as to suggest that the IAs took this otherwise unattested stem from Iranian and used it so commonly and productively.

Rather, the Iranians left the region of the 7 rivers and held the name in their memory. Something very similar happens with the V river-name Sarasvat/ and Av Harahvaiti-. Avestan has no other cogn with harah- whereas S has sr > sarati/sisarti, sarana, saras, sarit, etc, etc and of course cognates are found in other IE branches: here again it is the Iranians that took with them the memory of the Indic river and gave it to a river in their new habitat... Moreover, Vedic retains the PIE s but this becomes h in Avestan. All this actual linguistic evidence and the conclusion it forces upon us has some archaeological/geographical support. G Gnoli, who is a normal AIT adherent and by no means an indigenist, showed very clearly that the early portions of the Avesta hardly know northern and western Iran and he analyses migrations there from south to north and east to west but not north- west down to south-east (1980). Thus while the conjectural Indo-Iranian movement south-eastward contains many anomalies, the Iranian movement from Saptasindhu north-westward accommodates all facts.

It could be argued that the IAs developed their complex but secure system of oral transmission while on the move. ... But, if that were so, what would the IAs (or Indo- Iranians, since they were one people, according to the AIT) be transmitting and thus preserving? Their sacred RV was composed in the Saptasindhu. If they had developed their superb system while on the move, then they would have at least a few tales of their adventurous trekking and these would have been embodied in the hymns of the RV.

How did the Indoaryans manage to maintain an oral tradition of such quality that their culture retained more cultural elements (eg names of deities) and many more lexical items (and grammatical features as any text on IE philology testifies? The only explanation I can think of regarding the superiority in retentions of Sanskrit is that the Indoaryans moved very little or not at all.

This, then, is the basis for the mainstream chronology of ancient Indian literature and the AIT. It is not based on linguistic evidence as is generally and vaguely but vociferously claimed but on a ghost story composed 2500 years after the alleged Aryan invasion (which initially was Egyptian and Mesopotamian) and on a Christian ecclesiastic myth: in other words, on two fictions!

From a very long experience of reading, studying and teaching, of participating in Conferences and, in recent years, of editing articles for Journals (and, of course, private contacts and exchanges with scholars in many fields) I acquired the certainty that very few academics use their reason to the full and even fewer are, despite their vociferous protestations to the contrary, interested in truth.

Now in Avestan ‘lake/pool’ is vairi-. In fact Avestan has no verb or nouns cognate to the Sanskrit ones √sṛ >sar-. The only cognation is harah- in the name of the river harahvaiti – nothing else. But S √sṛ >sar- is a perfectly PIE morpheme appearing in Tocharian B sal-ate, Gk hiallō/hallomai and Latin salire all implying ‘moving, jumping’. Avestan somehow lost this root and its derivatives. So, how did the Iranians manage to concoct this name Harahvaiti, that sounds so exactly like a transliteration of the Vedic Sarasvatī , when they had no words from √sṛ > sar-? Adherents of the AIT offer no rational answers. (For full discussion see Kazanas 2004b, Prabhakar 1994/1995.) There is only one possible explanation. The Iranians, having lived in Saptasindhu moved to Iran (retaining the memory of the place as Haptahәndu); on meeting an amenable river there they gave it the name of the river they had formerly known – Sarasvati > Harahvaiti. The AIT can in no way, except by violating rationality, explain the two Avestan names Haptahәndu and Harahvaiti. This, if nothing else, should have alerted the AIT adherents to the possibility that there is something very seriously wrong in their migrationist scenario. Moreover, it is part of the general linguistic theory that the Avestan h derives from PIE s: so, it is again extremely difficult to see how the IAs who moved further southeast, retained the original s (in saras and saptasindhu) while the Iranians changed it to h.

Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that, since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland.

That most mainstream philologists will react unfavourably to this thesis I take for granted. I know well in myself the force of habit and of attachment to deep-rooted notions that reacts more through emotional outbursts than cool rationality. I repeat that the issue of origins, of when and how, is one not for philologists but for archaeologists and experts in related fields. We owe it, other than to the peoples of India who, I think, have long been wronged (by their own faults no less than foreign influences), to truth itself, which is the primary concern of all of us, to consider this thesis without prejudice.

In this study Witzel talks of a peaceful immigration but also uses the terms "battles" and "campaigns" (324), "initial conquest" (326) and "frequent warfare" (339) thus indicating that beneath the lipservice to "migration" (which became fashionable) lurks the notion of invasion.

In summing up his extended survey of linguistic evidence Witzel tells us that the mode of the IA entry is "archaeologically still little traced"; it is, he states, securely traced in the texts (horses, chariots, religion etc) and from linguistics and possibly from future studies of the male Y chromosome (2001: 55-56). Here we have an attempt at falsification ("little" when in fact it is none) and wishful thinking. Neither horses and chariots nor linguistic phenomena, such as Witzel provides, prove any entry. They are interpretations of facts by a mind already colored by the AIT.

M. Witzel attacked several scholars who since the early 1990s manifested support for the Indian Indigenous Origin (IIO hereafter); amid various criticisms he used the term “revisionists”, ignoring obviously that in the early 19th century many European scholars took India, on the strength of Sanskrit, to be the original homeland... The term “revisonist” is therefore inapplicable. Witzel ignores also that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were ‘revisionists’ in rejecting the geocentric system...