Academics From Germany

"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."

"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 light of the preceding discussion, the racial interpretation of the of the notions light/white and dark/black found in Geldner's translations and echoed or precedented in numerous other publications must be considered dubious. Where there is sufficient context for interpretation, we find that the notions can at least equally well be read as an ‘ideological’ distinction between the ‘dark/black’ world of the dāsas/dasyus and the ‘light/white’ world of the āryas.”"

"The lectures of Ranke, the most eminent of German historians, I could not follow. He had a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject, as to slide down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, and then, with his eye fastened on the tip of it, to go mumbling through a kind of rhapsody, which most of my German fellow-students confessed they could not understand. It was a comical sight: half a dozen students crowding around his desk, listening as priests might listen to the sibyl on her tripod, the other students being scattered through the room, in various stages of discouragement."

"Leopold von Ranke is not only beyond all comparison the greatest historical scholar alive, but one of the very greatest historians that ever lived. Unrivalled stores of knowledge, depth of research, intimate acquaintance with the most recondite sources, have been, in his case, supplemented by everything which could be conferred by a long life, continuous study, close association with the great political actors and thinkers of the greatest part of the most eventful century of the world's history."

"Ranke developed no further the implications of his theory than to ensure a reproduction of a living past, as perfect as with the sources at his disposal and the political instincts of his time it was possible to secure... [Ranke was] concrete, definite, searching for minute details, maintaining his own objectivity by insisting upon the subjectivity of the materials he handles."

"[T]he chief criticism against Ranke and the Ranke school of “objective” and “scientific” history is its total unphilosophicalness. Far from being scientific, Ranke was profoundly biassed; we have seen that he observed God’s handiwork in all history; he made no attempt at formulating a genuine philosophy or psychology."

"Though standards vary, greatness remains; indeed it is the true mark of greatness that it can survive changing standards. Shakespeare was great to Johnson; great to Coleridge; is great to us. Ranke was a historian of the same grandeur – great to his contemporaries, still great after the passage of a century; if not the greatest of historians, securely within the first half-dozen. Great as a scholar, great as a master of narrative, Ranke has the special claim of having achieved something more than his work; he founded a school, the school of scientific historians, which has dominated all historical thinking since his time, even when in reaction against it."

"Ranke did not stop at concrete description but attempted to pierce the deepest and most mysterious movements of life."

"You are in the first place a Christian: I am in the first place a historian. There is a gulf between us."

"Ranke has not only written a larger number of mostly excellent books than any man that ever lived, but he has taken pains from the first to explain how the thing is done. He attained a position unparalleled in literature, less by the display of extraordinary faculties than by perfect mastery of the secret of his craft, and that secret he has always made it his business to impart. For his most eminent predecessors, history was applied politics, fluid law, religion exemplified, or the school of patriotism. Ranke was the first German to pursue it for no purpose but its own. He tried to make the generality of educated men understand how it came about that the world of the fifteenth century was changed into the Europe of the nineteenth. His own definite persuasions regarding church and king were not suffered to permeate his books. It was meritorious in Böckh, but not heroic, to contain his feelings about the Attic treasure and the setting of Arcturus; but Ranke was concerned with all the materials of abiding conflict, with every cause for which he cared and men are willing to kill or die."

"The ultimate aim of historical writing is the bringing before us the whole truth."

"To history has been attributed the function to judge the past, to instruct ourselves for the advantage of the future. Such a lofty function the present work does not attempt. It aims merely to show how it actually took place."

"What one hears in Ranke. The whisper of statecraft. Not the tramp of democracy's earthquake feet. Not the dull roar of surging opinion."

"Universal History would degenerate into mere theory and speculation if it were to desert the firm ground of national history, but just as little can it afford to cling to this ground alone. The history of each separate nation throws light on the history of humanity at large; but there is a general historical life, which moves progressively from one nation or group of nations to another. In the conflict between the different national groups Universal History comes into being, while, at the same time, the sense of nationality is aroused, for nations do not draw their impulses to growth from themselves alone. Nationalities so powerful and distinct as the English or the Italian are not so much the offspring of the soil and the race as of the great events through which they have passed."

"Rigorous presentation of the facts, however conditional and lacking in beauty they may be, is without question the supreme law."

"Sagacity in judging the value of testimony is his only supreme quality."

"While an admirable critic of sources, Niebuhr read into his version of Roman history a variety of moral and philosophical views unwarranted by the existing evidence... Ranke, on the other hand, determined to hold strictly to the facts of history, to preach no sermon, to point no moral, to adorn no tale, but to tell the simple historic truth. His sole ambition was to narrate things as they really were "wie es eigentlich gewesen". Truth and objectivity were Ranke's highest aims. In his view, history is not for entertainment or edification, but for instruction... He did not believe in the historian's province to point out divine providence in human history."

"That history became "scientific" in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was probably due as much to the influence of Ranke as to the influence of natural science."

"Beyond question even Von Ranke, the leading exponent of colorless history, did not succeed in being wholly objective; much of his work was unconsciously written from the standpoint of the conservative reaction of his time in Prussia."

"[T]he history of German historical thought since Ranke's time has to a large extent been nothing but the spiritual and philosophical (weltanschauliche) debate about his legacy."

"A collection of national histories, whether on a larger or a smaller scale, is not what we mean by Universal History, for in such a work the general connection of things is liable to be obscured. To recognise this connection, to trace the sequence of those great events which link all nations together and control their destinies, is the task which the science of Universal History undertakes."

"But historical development does not rest on the tendency towards civilisation alone. It arises also from impulses of a very different kind, especially from the rivalry of nations engaged in conflict with each other for the possession of the soil or for political supremacy. It is in and through this conflict, affecting as it does all the domain of culture, that the great empires of history are formed. In their unceasing struggle for dominion the peculiar characteristics of each nation are modified by universal tendencies, but at the same time resist and react upon them."

"Ranke is cold and unenthusiastic; and, in judging individuals, it is well to be cold and unenthusiastic. But is there no room for warmth of feeling in recounting the efforts and the struggles of the race? Is it not possible to do for history what Darwin has done for science? Ranke, at all events, did not do it. He knew of the influence upon individuals of great waves of feeling and opinion; but he does not seek for the law of human progress which underlies them. He does not rejoice in that progress, or grieve at failure. Hence, perhaps, in part his preference for writing the history of many nations during the same period, rather than the history of one nation consecutively. To say this, however, is only to say that there is no finality in scientific progress. Whatever shape the histories of the future may take, they will assuredly be built on the foundations which Ranke has laid down with unerring hand."

"No one else has been able to speak with equal authority on the history of so many nations, Grote wrote nothing on the history of Rome, Mommsen has written nothing on the history of Greece. Ranke was equally at home in the Germany of the Reformation, in the France of Louis XIV., and in the England of Charles I. and Cromwell."

"The abuses might be either ideological or technological. If human intelligence were more successfully mirrored in the machine, will that not justify treating human beings as if they were MERE machines? [Weizenbaum’s] position on this is colored by the experience of Nazi Germany; but the argument is confused. The most savage tyrannies that I can find in history, including Nazism, had no doubt about a unique élan vital..."

"Our ignorance of brain function is currently so very nearly total that we could not even begin to frame appropriate research strategies. We would stand before the open brain, fancy instruments in hand, roughly as an unschooled labourer might stand before the exposed wiring of a computer: awed perhaps, but surely helpless. A microanalysis of brain functions is, moreover, no more useful for understanding anything about thinking than a corresponding analysis of the pulses flowing through a computer would be for understanding what program the computer is running. Such analyses would simply be at the wrong conceptual level. They might help to decide crucial experiments, but only after such experiments had been designed on the basis of much higher-level (for example, linguistic) theories."

"[On his anti-AI stance] “He fell out of the field ten years ago, and hasn’t done a damn thing since ELIZA,” one MIT colleague said contemptuously. An old friend of Weizenbaum’s shook his head sadly. “I have the impression that if Joe could do science, he wouldn’t be doing this. When I gave a talk about my AI work a couple of years ago at MIT, it was Joe who came up to me—and I can’t tell you the feeling he said this with— that he’d give his right arm to have done what I’d done. MIT is an incredibly competitive place, and regardless of whether you have tenure, the pressure to produce is terrific. Joe hasn’t produced science, so he’s got to do something. I wish he hadn’t chosen this.”"

"Weizenbaum went on to say that the geriatric robot was not only a sign of the authors’ lack of humanity; it symbolized the utter lack of humanity in anybody associated with the field of artificial intelligence. This, of course, was his main agenda; he’d been literally rubbing his hands together (I heard from Michael Dertouzos, one of his colleagues) as he roamed the halls of MIT, where he was then on the faculty. “This’ll get them,” he said to whoever would listen."

"Was du teurer bezahlst, die Lüge oder die Wahrheit? Jene kostet dein Ich, diese doch höchstens dein Glück."

"Tall as they grow, the flowers Are pale here, as if dead. Just one right in the middle Stands there so dark and red. Its hue is not from the daylight, No sun has burned this bud, Its red is from the earth bed, And that drank human blood!"

"It will be an important reference work in mythological studies for decades to come, being easily the most ambitious work in that field. Witzel makes an attempt, with apparent success, to reconstruct the history of myth, not for one culture in the past several thousand years but for mankind as a whole since its dispersal from Africa more than fifty-thousand years ago. ... Note that this work has only become possible now. We have collected the mythologies of nearly all tribes, very often recording them just as they were dying, either because tribes got converted to Christianity and were forgetting their own traditions, or because communities disintegrated into modern societies.... For the first time, we can give an account of the whole world’s myths, and therefore we must be glad that finally someone has taken on this task. ... This builds its reconstruction with the help of the archaeological and genetic evidence. Specialists of those disciplines will certainly complain that more of it could have been given, but then this book is a pioneering innovation and other scholars are invited to expand on this new paradigm."

"The IAs, as described in the RV, represent something definitely new in the subcontinent […] The obvious conclusion should be that these new elements somehow came from the outside."

"“It must be underlined that just like an ancient inscription, these words have not changed since the composition of these hymns c.1500 BCE, as the RV has been transmitted almost without any change […] The modern oral recitation of the RV is a tape recording of c.1700-1200 BCE.” (WITZEL 2000a:§8)."

"Elst disingenuously insists on calling any migration or even a ‘trickling in’ an ‘invasion’. However, immigration/trickling in and acculturation are entirely different from a (military) invasion, or from overpowering and/or eradicating the local population.... For Elst, however, ‘the ancient Hindus colonized the world’ while India, in reality, by and large, has been a cul de sac."

"Apparently, Dravidian speakers began influencing the Panjab only at this moment in time. Consequently, all linguistic and cultural deliberations based on the early presence of the Drav. in the area of speakers of IA, are void or they have to be reinvestigated. ... In short, the Panjab is an area of a Pre-rigvedic, largely Para-Munda substrate that apparently overlays a still older local level. Since no traces of the supposedly Dravidian language of the Indus civilization (Parpola 1994) are visible in the early RV (see below), the people who spoke this language must either have disappeared without a trace, or, more likely, the language of the Panjab was Para-Munda already during the Indus period (2600- 1900 BCE). Therefore, the most commonly used language among the languages of the Indus people, at least of those in the Panjab, must have been Para-Munda or a western form of Austro-Asiatic.... In short, even if Drav. had been the traders' language, it remains unexplainable why Drav. influence is only seen in the middle and late RV as well as later one (AV+). The reason cannot be, as van Driem (1999, appendix p. 2, quoting agreement with Parpola) supposes, that the oldest RV hymns were still "composed in more northerly areas, perhaps as far north as modern Afghanistan." (Parpola forthc.) On the contrary, even the oldest books of the RV (4-6) contain data covering all of the Greater Panjab..."

"[the Mitanni IA language] is attested by a number of OIA loan words in the non-IE Hurrite language of the Mit. realm of northern Iraq/Syria (c.1460-1330 BCE). The loans cover the semantic fields of horses, their colors, horse racing, and chariots, some important ‘Vedic‘ gods, and a large array of personal names adopted by the ruling class."

"The Kassite conquerors of Mesopotamia (c.1677-1152 BCE) have a sun god Šuriiaš, perhaps also the Marut and maybe even Bhaga (Bugaš?), as well as the personal name Abirat(t)aš (Abhiratha); but otherwise the vocabulary of their largely unknown language hardly shows any IA influence, not even in their many designations for the horse and horse names."

"The thrust of all Witzel’s misrepresentations is one and the same: to replace reasonable opinions with far-fetched or plainly nonsensical claims. Or in other words: to depict me as some kind of weirdo, fanatic and other ugly things besides.... For a well-established academic at a leading university, safe in his tenure and his creamy salary, approaching the completion of his career, Prof. Witzel’s behaviour seems odd to me. What is he afraid of that he thinks he must stoop to tackling me with these unacademic tricks? The reason for this unpleasant pattern of falsely attributing silly opinions to me is probably not far to seek. It is the fact that I have exposed a mistake made by Witzel in a crucial part of his pro-AIT argumentation... I have never accused Prof. Witzel of deceit or fraud. I prefer to live by Napoleon’s dictum: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained through incompetence”,-- or in this case, through over-enthusiasm for a long-hoped-for “discovery”. When people are very very thirsty, they start to see an oasis on the horizon; no malice intended, just self-delusion. Only, after his innocent mistake had been highlighted, Witzel’s reaction was rather unsportsmanlike. He claimed that it was all due to a printing error. That sounds a bit random for such a precise and sensational reading. As if you can put monkeys at a typewriter and let them produce an AIT-friendly translation by coincidence... What’s the big deal about standing corrected once in a while?"

"“The language of the RV is an archaic form of Indo-European. Its 1028 hymns are addressed to the gods and most of them are used in ritual. They were orally composed and strictly preserved by exact repetition through by rote learning, until today. It must be underlined that the Vedic texts are ‘tape recordings’ of this archaic period. Not one word, not a syllable, not even a tonal accent were allowed to be changed. The texts are therefore better than any manuscript, and as good as any well preserved contemporary inscription. We can therefore rely on the Vedic texts as contemporary sources for names of persons, places, rivers (WITZEL 1999c)” (WITZEL 2006:64-65)."

"The so-called ‘invasion’ of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in the archaeology."

"Even now, however, three RV periods can be established, as follows: 1. early Ṛgvedic period: c.1700-1450 BCE: RV books 4, 5, 6. 2. middle, main Ṛgvedic period : c.1450-1300 BCE: books 3, 7, 8.1-47, 8.60-66 and 1.51-191, most probably also 2; prominent: Pūru chieftain Trasadasyu and Bharata chieftain Sudās and their ancestors, and 3. late Ṛgvedic period: c.1300-1200 BCE: books 1.1-50, 8.48-59 (the late Vālakhilya hymns), 8.67-103, large sections of 9, and finally 10.1-84, 10.85- 191; emergence of the Kuru tribe, fully developed by the time of Parīkṣit a descendant of Trasadasyu... With Indo-Aryan settlement mainly in Gandhāra/Panjab, but occasionally extending upto Yamunā/Gangā, e.g. Atri poem 5.52.17; the relatively old poem 6.45.13 [sic] has gāngya [...] Even the oldest books of the RV (4-6) contain data covering all of the Greater Panjab: note the rivers Sindhu 4.54.6, 4.55.3, 5.53.9 ̳Indus‘; Asiknī 4.17.5 ̳Chenab‘; Paru ṣṇ ī 4.22.3. 5.52.9 'Ravi‘; Vipāś 4.30.11 (Vibali) 'Beas‘; Yamunā 5.52.17; Gangā 6.45.31 with gāngya 'belonging to the Ganges‘ [...] G. van Driem and A. Parpola (1999) believe that these oldest hymns were still composed in Afghanistan [...]. This is, however, not the case as these books contain references to the major rivers of the Panjab, even the Ganges (see above)."

"This word [Druhyu] means, literally, ‘the ones who seek to cheat’. Non-linguist as he is, Talageri missed a great chance for a ‘socio-ethnic’ study based on an etymology!"

"In general, the books of RV level I (RV 4-6) are thoroughly South Asian and have reference to local climate, trees and animals. We therefore have to take them seriously at their word, and cannot claim that they belong just to Afghanistan."

"“I have also since changed my opinion, based on new evidence, about the relative date of the bulk of RV2 which I would now include in the mid-level texts”."

"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."

"There is the following direct statement contained in the (admittedly much later) BSS, 18.44:397.9 sqq which has once again been over-looked, not having been translated yet: ‘Ayu went eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru-PañcAla and the KASI-Videha. This is the Ayava (migration). (His other people) stayed at home in the West. His people are the GAndhArI, ParSu and AraTTa. This is the AmAvasava (group)’."

"[Kurukṣetra] became the heartland of the Bharatas well into the Vedic period. It is here that 3.53.11 places the centre of the earth."

"“Not only the language, but also the culture of the newly arrived elite was appropriated, including the 'Vedic Tank' the horse drawn chariot.”"

"Given the scholarly inclinations among the expatriate communities in North America we may expect a slew of new interpretations, in fact, a whole new cottage industry. Their impact will appear especially on the internet."