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[the Sintashta-Arkaim culture on the W. Siberian plains east of the Urals,] "dated to c.2200/2100-1700/1600 BC", [where] "the earliest attested trace… - Michael Witzel
" "[the Sintashta-Arkaim culture on the W. Siberian plains east of the Urals,] "dated to c.2200/2100-1700/1600 BC", [where] "the earliest attested traces of Aryan material culture "and even of Aryan belief". ..[there we find] "remnants of horse sacrifices (aśvamedha) and primitive horse drawn chariots (ratha, raθa) with spoked wheels [....] a real tripura [....] adobe bricks (*išt) [....] frame houses (which reminds of Rgvedic kula 'hollow, family‘ [....]) [....] Most tellingly, perhaps, at the site of Potapovka (N. Krasnayarsk Dt., near Kybyshev on the N. Volga steppe), a unique burial has been found. It contains a human skeleton whose head has been replaced by a horse head, a human head lies near his feet, along with a bone pipe, and a cow‘s head is placed near his knees. This looks like an archaeological illustration of the Rgvedic myth of Dadhyanc, whose head was cut off by Indra and replaced by that of a horse. The bone pipe reminds, as the excavator has noted, of the RV sentence referring to the playing of pipes in Yama‘s realm, the world of the ancestors".
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About Michael Witzel
Michael Witzel (born July 18, 1943) is a German-American philologist and academic. Witzel is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series (volumes 50-80). He is an author on Indian sacred texts and Indian history, and a critic of the "Indigenous Aryans" theory and of right-wing Hindu activists. In 2005, he attracted the scorn of Hindu activists when he opposed their attempts to influence USA school curricula in the California textbook controversy over Hindu history.
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Alternative Names:
E.J.M. Witzel
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Additional quotes by Michael Witzel
Other writers in Kazanas’ class, including D. Frawley, K. Elst, and N. S. Rajaram, have already caused significant damage to linguistics, philology, Indology, archaeology, and history.... In the fundamentalist/nationalistic circles from, which Kazanas draws support – despite his pretense of political naivete.
“Right from the beginning, in Ṛgvedic times, elaborate steps were taken to insure the exact reproduction of the words of the ancient poets. As a result, the Ṛgveda still has the exact same wording in such distant regions as Kashmir, Kerala and Orissa, and even the long-extinct musical accents have been preserved. Vedic transmission is thus superior to that of the Hebrew or Greek Bible, or the Greek, Latin and Chinese classics. We can actually regard present-day Ṛgveda recitation as a tape recording of what was composed and recited some 3000 years ago. In addition, unlike the constantly reformulated Epics and Purāṇas, the Vedic texts contain contemporary materials. They can serve as snapshots of the political and cultural situation of the particular period and area in which they were composed. […] as they are contemporary, and faithfully preserved, these texts are equivalent to inscriptions. […] they are immediate and unchanged evidence, a sort of oral history ― and sometimes autobiography ― of the period, frequently fixed and ‘taped’ immediately after the event by poetic formulation. These aspects of the Vedas have never been sufficiently stressed […]” (WITZEL 1995a:91).
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