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Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?

— Edmund Leach

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More quotes by Edmund Leach

The Aryan invasions never happened at all.
Of course no one is going to believe that.

Yet here is precisely where anthropologists might make a useful contribution, if only their scholarly associates would stop thinking of the Rig Veda as a garbled history book.

Records are preserved because they provide a charter for what historians believe about the present. Different historians may believe different things, and the records are interpreted (and modified) accordingly.

In this essay I am mainly concerned with one particular case in which an oral tradition has been treated as if it were a datable written record and myth has been confused with history as it actually happened.

I am well aware that for an outsider to attempt to bring about a shift in this entrenched paradigm is like trying to cut down a 300-year-old oak tree with a penknife. But the job will have to be done one day.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edmund Leach (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.