Josef Strzygowski

"... for an oriental philologist who undertook the study of art history was not seen as fully respectable, and an art historian, on the other hand, who worked without knowledge of the different languages was seen ever afterwards as a dilettante by the powers that be. Thus the difficult research on the transitional areas between antiquity and medieval art, one characterized by numerous national and linguistic opposing forces, has been left to colleagues who are ready either, as specialists, to die of hunger, or as pariahs, to knock about between the well-established research areas. Under such conditions it was not at all possible to establish the necessary foundations, and to do so [based on] philological fundamentals."

"The discovery of Iran was only the first step toward a much greater surprise: I recognized that something stood behind Iran and its significance, something that linguistics has been occupied with for the last one hundred years without really getting anywhere: the Indo- German question."