Dr. MICHEAL WITZEL, PROFESOOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr. MICHEAL WITZEL, PROFESOOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

THE HISTORICITY OF THE VEDAS | "The historicity, i.e. the actual existence of the Vedas, has been denied by some (due to the millennia-long oral tradition without writing) and its existence has been pushed back by others, to 3102 BCE or even earlier. Here, I will try to navigate these positions and will try to indicate, based on multidisciplinary evidence, the existence of early Vedic texts (Ṛgveda) around 1200 BCE. Therefore, this paper will not be looked on favorably by the intellectual (and political) LEFT and certainly not by the RIGHT, while also not by traditional Pandits as far as they do not venture from their closed box of traditional Sanskrit texts, however extremely well studied by them. Rather, the aim is to distill what is actually contained in the Vedas, based on a multi-disciplinary approach. As a specialist in Indology, that is in the texts of the Vedas in particular, I cannot be a specialist in the various sciences from Archaeology to Zoology, but we have tried to do so in our yearly Round Tables at Harvard (1999-2010/14), and I have kept up with background readings. So, this talk will present a multidisciplinary approach to the Historicity of the Vedas". Prof. Michael Witzel was born in 1943 in Germany and received education at University of Tubingen, University of Erlangen- Nurnberg in Germany and acquired PhD in 1972 and had exposure to Mimamsa philosophy at Tribhuvan University of Kathmandu under Nayib Gurujyu Jununath Pandit. He held teaching positions of Sanskrit at Universities at Germany, The Netherlands and Wales Professor at Harvard University. He held coveted positions such as Director of Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, Director of Nepal Research Centre of the German Oriental Society, Kathmandu and Research Fellow atCollege de France, Paris and Visiting Professor to Tokyo University as well as Visiting Researcher to RIHN, Kyoto. He was Chairman of the Department of South & Central Asian and Old and Middle Iranian at University of Leiden, Chairman of Dutch Indological Association and Chair of Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, and Founding Chair of the Committee on South Asian Studies at Harvard University, President of Association for the Language in Prehistory and President of International Association for Comparative Mythology at Boston. He was editor of several international journals as well as Harvard Oriental Series. Witzel is a renowned German-American philologist, comparative mythologist and Indologist. He is an author on Indian Sanskrit texts, particularly the Vedas and Indian history. He became Cabot Fellow, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University recognizing his book on comparative mythology. His main topics of scholarly research are the dialects of Vedic Sanskrit, old Indian history, the development of Vedic religion and the linguistic prehistory of Indian Subcontinent. He focused on the localization of Vedic Texts and evidence contained in them for early Indian history resulting in several books. He studied the various Vedic recensions and their importance for the geographical spread of Vedic culture across North India and beyond. He explored the linguistic aspect of earliest Indian history in a number of papers. His studies in the field resulted in a new scheme of historical comparative mythology that covers most of Eurasia and the Americas that was pursued in a number of papers and in the book titled The Origins of the World’s Mythologies, a magnum opus and was praised by Professor of Sanskrit Frederick Smith. He organized several international conferences. He is bold enough to express his opinion without fear.