I have seriously changed my mind on this subject; I have no axe to grind, as it were, no position or reputation to maintain; I can and shall change m… - Nikos Kazanas

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.

Neither the AIT, nor the invasionists’ or non-invasionists’ views, nor IE reconstructions, nor philological, archeological etc pursuits, hold much interest for me. What essentially concerns me is the subject of Ethics (in Scholarship and daily life) because this will determine how we meet death. Everything else in the world can be avoided, hoodwinked etc, but not death. Ethics also infuses communal life with the quality of excellence.

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.