I am sure this is correct. There appear to have been multiple streams of motivation for "scholars" to relentlessly pursue certain ideas over and above other possible ideas.For a community of Europeans whose history was supposed to have started with the Greeks and Romans, the "discovery" of ancient civilizations of Assyria and Mesopotamia came as a shock that demanded a rewriting of their own past as possibly having been later than or less than a people who were considered inferior by secular and religious opinion of the day.Prem Kumar wrote: I had also noted yesterday that the tree model most likely has a Judeo-Christian theological basis to it. Not that its a disqualification by itself, but its a pointer to why linguists started off with the tree assumption in the first place and resist changing it (due to career reasons or worldview reasons or simply because the alternate hypotheses are too hard)
The "discovery" of Sanskrit was initially a shocker as the one thing that they could hold on to, language, appeared to have alien roots.
Both these issues were rapidly addressed in academia. The Assyrians were a morally degraded people. To top that Sanskrit provided "proof" of an even more glorious race of "Aryans" - northern conquerors who set the remote trend of European domination. The white Aryan theories were well accepted and internalized in Europe. The Germans found the Mitanni texts as proof of how Europe had imposed its hegemony over the Semites as militarily victorious Aryans moved to faraway India to drive away the Dravidians. These theories held sway at a time when our fathers or grandfathers were being educated, until Hitler took it too far and tried to implement the supposed superiority of white Aryans over the descendants of the Semitic races of Assyria and Mesopotamia.
The second word war reset theories of racial superiority but did nothing to a century and a half of "academic" work and theories that had been done by scores of people who saw history as a story of military domination of one race over another. Stories of valour, victory, weaponry and domination had already been written into the accounts of the historic people studied. Concepts of peaceful migration and civilizations that existed sans violent subjugation did not even occur to a century of scholarship who believed that the entire world was a balance of military domination of one over the other, with no space left for trade and culture.
The only history that these scholars knew, Greek history from Greek accounts and later Persian and Assyrian history suggested that the model of conquering killing military represented the past, while civilization and fine arts were a recent phenomenon founded in Europe. Unsurprisingly the Rig Veda has been read as the account of a savage murderous race of people on par with Huns or other hordes, albeit with a monotheistic religious colour attributed to the Rig Veda to fit in with the need to identify with European history.
European academia are not going to rise out of these biases anytime soo. Indians too, brought up to lap up every word that comes out of the west to the extent of using BBC to learn English are not going to reassess anything very soon. But a reassessment needs to be done and a mass movement started to have a complete re-look at all the "academic" work in history, philology and archaeology over the last 150 to 200 years. And this IMO includes taking a detailed look at how accurate and unbiased were the decoding and translations of text like Behistun and Mitanni.
For much of this, translations of old German or other European works will be required. Computers and automatic translating will possibly help in getting access to obscure texts that do not exist outside of their original German or Czech, but have been read and internalized by scholars n European universities who occupy well funded chairs in America in as exemplified by Witzel's quoting of von Soden.
SN_Rajan earlier on this thread took the naive view that he would stick to data and avoid fluff. This attitude appears very noble but is uninformed because of what he does not know and may never know unless one looks at the facts available. European scholars from the 1800s to the 1950s were under political pressure to conform to social, political or religious world views. People who did not do that were often punished, ostracized or criticised. Von Soden himself was under pressure to conform, so the personal lives of academicians had a bearing on their scholarship. If Indian scholars can be accused of bias it is silly to assume even handedness and lack of bias in western scholarship. Indians have to get beyond this starting line sticking point before we can start re examining the humongous volumes of work done so far.
ve haff vork to do..
