Arthur Berriedale Keith

Arthur Berriedale Keith (5 April 1879 – 6 October 1944) was a Scottish constitutional lawyer, scholar of Sanskrit and Indologist. He became Regius Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology and Lecturer on the Constitution of the British Empire in the University of Edinburgh. He served in this role from 1914 to 1944.

Quotes

• Nothing is more unsatisfactory than to attempt to define Indo-European society on the assumption that the Indo-Europeans knew only what can be ascribed to them on con- clusive evidence. Ex hypothesi, there were great dispersals of peoples from the original home, and those who wondered away were unquestionably constantly intermingling with other peoples . . . and it is not to be wondered at that in new surroundings new words were employed; still less can it be a matter of surprise that peoples which ceased to be in contact with natural features soon dropped the names which had become use- less.
  • Keith, A. B. 1933. "The Home of the Indo-Europeans." In Oriental Studies in Honour of Cursetji Eracliji Pavry (188-199). Ed. J. D. Pavry. London: Oxford University Press. (189-190) quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

• ...the Vedic index. This book is an encyclopedia of historical and sociological knowledge extracted by study of the Vedic texts. It is based on a thorough review of Orientalist research, including especially the work of German Orientalists, but it is at the same time very much a British reading of the Vedic texts and the Orientalist interpretation of them.
  • About the Vedic index. Trautmann, Thomas R. (2008). Aryans and British India. 208

• “It is certain ... that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India... the bulk at least [ of the Rigveda] seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvati river.”
  • (1922: 79); 1922, The Age of the Rigveda ' in The Cambridge History of India , Vol.I. quoted from THE ṚGVEDA AND INDO-EUROPEANS Author(s): Nicholas Kazanas Source: Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 80, No. 1/4 (1999), pp. 15-42

• By taking the linguistic evidence too literally one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet but not rain or hands!
  • A.B. Keith, in Demoule, JP. Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans_ Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West