Paul Thieme

"“All the Dravidian languages known to us fairly bristle with loans from Sanskrit and the Aryan vernaculars. Dravidian literature in South India came into existence under the impulse and influence of Sanskrit literature and speech. Wherever there is a correspondence in the vocabularies of Sanskrit and Dravidian, there is a presumption, to be removed only by specific argument, that Sanskrit has been the lender, Dravidian the borrower.” ....“If a word can be explained easily from material extant in Sanskrit itself, there is little chance for such a hypothesis”."

"“The discovery of ‘Aryan’ looking names of (Mitanni) princes on cuneiform documents in Akkadian from the second half of the second millennium BC (chiefly tablets from Bogazkoy and El-Amarna), several doubtlessly Aryan words in Kikkuli’s treatise in Hittite on horse training (numerals: aika- ‘one’, tera- ‘three’, panza- ‘five’, satta – ‘seven’, na(ya) – ‘nine’; appellatives: varttana – ‘circuit’, course (in which horses move when being trained),’ aliya – ‘horse’), and, finally, a series of names of Aryan divinities on a Mitanni-Hatti and a Hatti-Mitanni treaty (14th century BC), poses a number of problems that have been reportedly discussed since the beginning of the century.”"

"In a list of names of gods with Babylonian equivalents we find a sun-god Suriyas (rendered Samas) which must clearly be identified with Skt Surya. In addition, Maruttas the war-god (rendered En-Urta) has been compared with Skt Marut ... Among the kings of this dynasty one has a name which can be interpreted as Aryan: Abhirattas: abhi-ratha ñ ëfacing chariots in battleí."

"The fact that proto-Aryan *ai and *au are replaced in Indo-Aryan by e and o, while in Iranian they are preserved as ai and au and that ai and au regularly appear on the Anatolian documents (eg. Kikkuli‘s aika), is unfortunately inconclusive. It is quite possible that at the time of our oldest records (the hymns of the Rigveda) the actual pronunciation of the sounds developed for *ai and *au spoken and written by the tradition as e and o, was still ai and au. The e and o can be a secondarily introduced change under the influence of the spoken language or the scholastic recitation."

"In the 1930s, numerous Indologists sought to anchor Nazi racial theory in ancient "Aryan" history and literature, including Erich Frauwallner, Hermann Güntert, Hermann Lommel, Paul Thieme, and Ludwig Alsdorf."

"“An example of this more sophisticated orientalism is the work of Paul Thieme”... esp. his “analysis of the Sanskrit word ārya, where at the end he adverts to the main point of his research: to go beyond India in order to catch the ‘distant echo of Indo-germanic customs’.”"