Nicholas Kazanas Quotes

Nicholas Kazanas is a Greek Indologist. He was born in 1939 in Chios, Greece.

He studied at University College, Economics and Philosophy at the School of Economic Science and Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and did a post-graduate at SOAS and at Deccan College in Pune. He taught in London and Athens. Since 1980 he led the Omilos Meleton Cultural Institute. He is on the Editorial Board of Adyar Library Bulletin. Beginning in 1997 Kazanas accepted the Vedic Tradition and its place in the broader Indo-European culture.His work was criticized by M. Witzel, Richard Meadow, Martin Huld, Edwin Bryant, D. P. Agrawal, Asko Parpola, Stefan Zimmer, J. P. Mallory, Elena Kuzmina and others.He was one of the few contributors in a special volume of the Journal of Indo-European Studies on the Indo-Aryan migration theory who argued against the theory. Kazanas' paper was criticized by nine scholars, among them JP Mallory. In the latter issue of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, Kazanas responded to all his critics in the article ‘Final Reply’.

✵ 1939

Nicholas Kazanas: 2 quotes0 likes

Nicholas Kazanas Quotes

“The all-inclusiveness of the RV in the realm of mythology is also observable in the sphere of poetics. There is hardly a major poetic device in the various IE branches that is not present in the RV. A significant aspect, for example, is that in early Greek poetry (epics of Homer and Hesiod, and some epigraphic material) the fairly strict syllabic meter (the hexameter with its dactylic, iambic and other variants) is preponderant with only traces of alliteration; in Germanic poetry alliteration prevails while the syllabic meter is very loose: both are present in the RV. …Early Irish poetry (6th century CE) has both meter and alliteration (and rhyme) but this hardly counts since the Irish poets knew these poetic devices “from Vergil and Ovid” and, of course, the Romans developed them from the Greek tradition. Of the Vedic poetic art Watkins writes: “The language of India from its earliest documentation in the Rigveda has raised the art of the phonetic figure to what many would consider its highest form.””

Nicholas Kazanas

"Indo-European Deities and the Rigveda," JIES 29 (2001), p. 257.

“That most mainstream philologists will react unfavourably to this thesis I take for granted. I know well in myself the force of habit and of attachment to deep-rooted notions that reacts more through emotional outbursts than cool rationality. I repeat that the issue of origins, of when and how, is one not for philologists but for archaeologists and experts in related fields. We owe it, other than to the peoples of India who, I think, have long been wronged (by their own faults no less than foreign influences), to truth itself, which is the primary concern of all of us, to consider this thesis without prejudice.”

Nicholas Kazanas

"Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda," JIES 30 (2002), p. 275.

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