Archaeology and history

[Prasad Velusamy]

<<In the wake of the Rajaram "horse-seal" fiasco, some list members may be
interested in the following:

Arnold, Bettina. 1990. Past As Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi
Germany. Antiquity 64, no. 244: 464-78.

Or, the shorter version for a non-scholarly audience:

Arnold, Bettina. 1992. The Past As Propaganda: How Hitler's Archaeologists
Distorted European Prehistory to Justify Racist and Territorial Goals.
Archaeology 45, no. 4 (Jul./Aug.): 30-37.

The latter article closes with this:

"The potential for political exploitation of the past seems to be greatest
in countries experiencing internal instability. Germany in the years
following World War I was a country searching for its own twentieth-century
identity. Prehistoric archaeology was one means to that end."

Best,

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
University of California, Berkeley>>

Sanskrit philology too was useful; a) Leon Poliakov,
The Aryan myth ('74) b) Maurice Olender, The languages
of Paradise: Race, religin and philology in the
nineteenth century ('92).

[Begin Quote]
  Yet another important aspect for the understanding of any European
  scholar's perspective on ancient Indian culture was the growth
  of antisemitism throughout Europe. Antisemitism also had a philological
  dimension (see especially POLIAKOV 1974; OLENDER 1992). During the
  nineteenth century, there was considerable concern over what language
  may have been spoken in the Biblical "paradise". Hebrew was the
  original language of the Bible. It was the oldest known language
  until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and its decipherment,
  unlocked even more ancient languages. However, Hebrew was also the
  language of the Jews and decidedly distant from any past or then
  present European language. Biblical "history" was not to be
  challenged. However, human language at the time of creation was open
  to question. In the context of antisemitism, a scholarly proposition
  that "Adam and Eve" spoke Hebrew made European scholars very
  uncomfortable. JONES's hypothesis of a relationship linking Sanskrit
  with Latin and Greek combined to yield philological chronologies
  and a proposed reconstruction of a proto-Indo-Aryan/European
  language. Efforts to define an Indo-European homeland somewhere
  between India and eastern Europe provided many European scholars
  with an alternative to Hebrew as the language of "paradise".
  If the language of paradise was not Sanskrit, then perhaps it was
  proto-Indo-Aryan/European. Hebrew became defined as just the
  language of Biblical record
  [End Quote]

  From Jim Shaffer & Diane Lichtenstein, Migration, Philology and South
  Asian archaeology, '99.

  Sincerely,
  Prasad


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