Person:

Witzel, Michael

This presentation begins with a brief overview of opinions on the origin of human language and the controversial question of Neanderthal speech. Moving from the language of the "African Eve" to the specific ones of the subcontinent, a brief overview is given of the prehistoric and current South Asian language families as well as their development over the past c. 5000 years. The equivalents of phylogeny and epigenetics in linguistics are then dealt with, that is, the successful Darwinian-style phylogenetic reconstruction of language families (as "trees"), which is interfered with by the separate wave-like spread of certain features across linguistic boundaries, even across language families. A combination of both features leads to the emergence of the current South Asian linguistic area (sprachbund). This development has made the structure of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or Munda similar to each other but it could not eliminate most of their individual characteristics.

Mythological compendia and indexes such as that by Stith Thompson create the impression that flood myths are rare in Africa and Australia. Erroneously, I too thought so in my short summary of Laurasian mythology (2001). A closer look at the worldwide distribution of flood myths tells differently. While they are fairly widespread in the Laurasian Area (Eurasia, Polynesia, the Americas), they are by no means absent from what I like to call the Gondwana belt (sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea / Melanesia, Australia). The hundreds of recorded flood myths from both areas can be classified into a few major types, region per region. A comparison of the Australian and African versions indicates a strong overlap that goes back to the time of the exodus from Africa, some 60,000 years ago. The Eurasian-American versions are more narrowly confined to a few basic types that can be traced back to the emergence of Laurasian mythology. However, the Laurasian types clearly emerge from the earlier Gondwana prototype. In sum, the flood myth is an ancient inheritance of human mythology. It is part of a very old core of myths connected with the emergence of humans and their early, evil ways – surprisingly echoing the Mesopotamian and Biblical accounts in many respects. Whether this myth has taken shape among the bottleneck population along the shores of E.Africa or even before, in the mind of the African Eve must remain moot, just as the psychological reason for its invention and formulation, which is a topic to be investigated by the study of the human brain and its productions.

The Late Vedic and earliest Buddhist texts are investigated to indicate their relative historical layering. Besides the texts themselves, their language, place names, archaeological and inherent historical background are brought to bear. These data and those on some historical contemporaries of the Buddha do not indicate a correlation with late Vedic personalities and texts. A certain period of time separates both corpora.

This article seeks to establish that the ‘southern’ shamanism of the San, Andamanese and Australian Aboriginals differs substantially from the well-known ‘classical’ Siberian version found in various forms in large parts of Eurasia and the Americas (‘Laurasia’). The typical southern (‘Gondwana’) shamanistic features of heat rising up the spine are linked to medieval Indian Kundalini yoga and some representations in Paleolithic art. This process is an important aspect of the change of consciousness initiated by shamanistic initiation and practice.

The mythologies and rituals of the three populations show a remarkable amount of overlap, in spite of their distant locations: in northern Arizona, the Kathmandu Valley, and southern New Guinea. They exhibit the mytheme of a large number of visiting deities that appear at certain periods during the year. These ritually undertake a number of actions, usually related to the agricultural cycle, and then return to their respective homes. Usually violent sacrifice is involved as well. It will be suggested how these myths and sacrifices evolved in Neolithic horticultural societies, by pathway dependency, from earlier Palaeolithic beliefs.

This paper discusses the post-enlightenment development of philology in Europe during the 19th-20th centuries, particularly in the German speaking areas. After several centuries of sustained interest in the Graeco-Roman Classics, all types of medieval, older European and Asian literatures became the focus of new textual approaches. Prominent was an historical and critical approach bolstered by the newly developed MSS stemmatics and the new evidence from comparative historical linguistics. After a brief retrospective, the paper follows some of the salient features of these developments from c. 1800 CE onward: including the development of the text-critical and stemmatic method by Lachmann; early Indo-European and Neogrammarian approaches to linguistics; also, briefly, the religious and mythological approaches to the texts such as those of Max Müller; the intrusion of ‘race science’, and the increasing, if rather temporary influence of ethnology. A detailed discussion of the stemmatic approach and its later critics follows. Special attention is given to the situation in South Asian, notably in Sanskrit Studies. Finally, the paper discusses at some length the recent development of computer-based stemmatics that use biology-inspired computer programs. The paper concludeswith a discussion of the prospects of stemmatic approaches in Indology.

This chapter examines the history of the agnihotra in the Kathmandu valley. This ritual is Vedic, but is considered to be an antecedent to the tantric homa. The ritual is known to have been performed in Nepal by the fifteenth century, and perhaps, but with less certainty in the fourteenth. Witzel goes on to describe two of the four agnihotra performed in Patan—the two have been continuously performed for some centuries, while the other two are relatively recent revivals. These performances employ the traditional three fires of Vedic ritual, though known here by different names. The study closes with an analysis of the similarities and differences between the two agnihotra.

Organizations associated with India’s BJP political party and the Sangh Parivar have attempted to fundamentally and inaccurately revise textbooks to propagate a Hindu nationalist view in Californian and Indian schoolbooks.

After several hundred years of text composition and accumulation, from the RV down to the Upaniṣads and the oldest Sūtras, the actual process of canonization remains unclear, just as the time and place where this took place for many individual texts. While the texts of the grammarians Pāṇini and Patañjali provide some inkling of the end of the canonization process, Pāṇini’s date remains uncertain and Patañjali’s (150 BCE) is too late. However, looking at the problem both from a macro-Indian and a comparative Southwest Asian point of view provides indications of when and how canonization took place in Vedic India, and in Zoroastrian Iran. A key factor in this development was the little understood role of Gandhāra, a Persian province from c. 530-326 BCE. The known Persian insistence on collection and formation and writing down of local canons, from Egypt to Israel and Ionia, allows assuming that Gandhāra and neighboring Arachosia played a similar role for the formation of the Vedic and Avestan canons, along with the concurrent normative description of Vedic and Sanskrit grammar by Pāṇini. Mutual interaction and various forms of reactions, such as the stress on oral preservation, between Gandhāra, Arachosia (Zoroastrian canon) and Kosala-Videha area (Śākalya Ṛgveda, Baudhāyana Śrautasūtra) are indicated, and the various local responses to Persian cultural policies discussed.