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The "Aryan race" is a concept in European culture that was influential in
the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It derives
from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and
their descendents up to the present day constitute a distinctive race. In
its best-known incarnation, under Nazism, it was argued that the earliest
Aryans were identical to Nordic people. Belief in the superiority of the
"Aryan race" is sometimes referred to as Aryanism. This should not be
confused with the unrelated Christian religious belief known as Arianism.The
term Aryan originates with the Indo-Iranian self-designation arya, attested
in the ancient texts of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, the Rigveda and the
Gathas of Zoroaster.
Since, in the 19th century, the Indo-Iranians were the most ancient known
speakers of "Indo-European" languages, the word Aryan was adopted to refer
not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to Indo-European speakers as a
whole, including the Armenians, Romans, Greeks, the Germans, Balts, Celts
and Slavs. It was argued that all of these languages originated from a
common root now known as Proto-Indo-European spoken by an ancient people
who must have been the original ancestors of the European, Iranian, and
Indo-Aryan peoples. The ethnic group composed of the Proto-Indo Europeans
and their modern descendants was termed the Aryans with the idea of
distinctive behavioral and ancestral ethnicity marked by language
distribution. This usage was common in the late 19th and early 20th century.
An example of an influential best-selling book that reflects this usage is
the 1920 book The Outline of History by H. G. Wells[1]. In it he wrote of
the accomplishments of the Aryan people, stating how they "learned methods
of civilization" while "Sargon II and Sardanapalus were ruling in Assyria
and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt". As such, Wells suggested
that the Aryans had eventually "subjugated the whole ancient world, Semitic,
Aegean and Egyptian alike".[2]
The usage of Aryan to mean "all Indo-Europeans" is now regarded by most
scholars as obsolete, though it is still seen occasionally and some people
continue this usage.[3] In today's English, "Aryan", if used at all in
scholarly contexts, is normally synonymous to Indo-Iranian, or
Proto-Indo-Iranian. The idea that the north Europeans were the "purest" of
these people was later theorized by the Comte de Gobineau and by other
writers, most notably his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote of
an "Aryan race"those who spoke Indo-European languages and were claimed to
be the "noblest" of people.
Albert
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