Nicholas Kazanas (born 1939) is a Greek Indologist.

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

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