Racial association of the term Aryan The term "Aryan" was originally used as an
ethnocultural self-designative identity and epithet of "noble" by
Indo-Iranians and the authors of the oldest known
religious texts of
Rig Veda and
Avesta within the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language family—Sanskrit and
Iranian, who lived in
ancient India and
Iran. Although the Sanskrit ā́rya- and Iranian *arya- descended from a form *ā̆rya-, it was only attested to the Indo-Iranian tribes.
Benjamin W. Fortson states that there may have been no term for self-designation of Proto-Indo-Europeans, and no such
morphemes has survived.
J. P. Mallory et al. states although the term "Aryan" takes on an ethnic meaning attesting to Indo-Iranians, there is no grounds for ascribing this semantic use to the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction of lexicon
*h₂eryós i.e. there is no evidence that the speakers of proto-language referred to themselves as "Aryans". However, in the 19th century, it was proposed that ā́rya- was not only the tribal self-designation of Indo-Iranians, but self-designation of Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, a theory rejected by modern scholarships. "Aryan" then came to be used by scholars of the 19th century to refer to Indo-Europeans. The now-discredited and
chronologically reconstructed North European hypothesis was endorsed by such scholars who situated the PIE homeland in northern Europe, which led to the association of "
Proto-Indo-Europeans", originally a hypothesized linguistic population of
Eurasian PIE speakers, with a new, imagined biological category: "a tall, light-complexioned, blonde, blue-eyed race" - supposed
phenotypic traits of
Nordic race. Scholars of this era established the ethnological term "Aryan" as the race that had spoken the Proto-Indo-European language, and in this context, the term was often used as a synonym for "Indo-Europeans". the Aryans in the Avesta were tall, light-skinned and frequently light-haired or light-eyed. According to Kossinna, the continuity of a "culture" exposits the continuity of a "race" which lived continuously in the same area, and the resemblance of a culture in a younger layer to a culture from an older layer indicates that the autochthonous
tribe from the homeland had migrated. Kossinna developed an ethnic paradigm in archaeology called
settlement archaeology and practiced the nationalistic interpretation of German archaeology for the
Third Reich. The obsolete North European hypothesis was endorsed by Kossinna and
Karl Penka, including German nationalists, which was later used by the Nazis to condone their genocidal and racist state policies. Kossinna identified the
Proto-Indo-Europeans with the
Corded Ware culture, and placed the
Proto-Indo-European homeland in
Schleswig-Holstein. He argued a
diffusionist model of culture, and emphasised the racial superiority of
Germanic peoples over
Romans (
Roman Empire) and
French, whom he described as destroyers of culture as compared to Germanics. Kossinna's ideas have been heavily criticised for its inherent ambiguities in the method and advocacy for the ideology of a
Germanic master race.
Earliest utilization of Aryan race shows the
Caucasian race (in shades of grayish blue-green) as comprising
Aryans,
Semites, and
Hamites.
Aryans are subdivided into
European Aryans and
Indo-Aryans (for those now called Indo-Iranians).
Max Müller popularized the term Aryan in his writings on
comparative linguistics, and is often identified as the first writer to mention an Aryan race in English. He began the racial interpretation of the
Vedic passages based upon his editing of the
Rigveda from 1849 to 1874. He postulated a small Aryan clan living on a high elevation in central Asia, speaking a proto-language ancestral to later Indo-European languages, which later branched off in two directions: one moved towards Europe and the other migrated to Iran, eventually splitting again with one group invading north-western India and conquering the dark-skinned
dasas of
Scythian origin who lived there. The northern Aryans of Europe became energetic and combative, and they invented the idea of a nation, while the southern Aryans of Iran and India were passive and meditative and focussed on religion and philosophy. Though he occasionally used the term "Aryan race" afterward, Müller later objected to the mixing of the linguistic and racial categories, In his 1888 lecture at
Oxford, he stated, "[the] science of Language and the science of Man cannot be kept too much asunder [...] it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar", and in his
Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (1888), he writes, "[the] ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes, and hair, is a great sinner as a linguist [...]". European scholars of 19th century interpreted the Vedic passages as depicting battle between light-skinned
Aryan migrants and dark-skinned indigenous tribes, but modern scholars reject this characterization of racial division as a misreading of the Sanskrit text, and "
dark and light worlds". In other contexts of the Vedic passages the dinstiction between
ārya and
dasyu refers to those who had adopted the
Vedic religion, speaking Vedic Sanskrit, and those who opposed it. However, increasing number of Western writers of this era, especially among anthropologists and non-specialists influenced by Darwinist theories, contrasted
Aryans as a "physical-genetic species" rather than an ethnolinguistic category. Encyclopedias and textbooks of historiography, ethnography, and anthropology from this era, such as
Meyers Konversations-Lexikon,
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie,
Nordisk familjebok,
H. G. Wells's
A Short History of the World,
John Clark Ridpath's
Great Races of Mankind, and other works reinforced European racial constructions developed on now-pseudoscientific concepts such as
racial taxonomy,
Social Darwinism, and
scientific racism to classify human races.
Theories of racial supremacy The term
Aryan was adopted by various
racist and
antisemitic writers such as
Arthur de Gobineau,
Theodor Poesche,
Houston Chamberlain,
Paul Broca,
Karl Penka and
Hans Günther during the nineteenth century for the promotion of
scientific racism, spawning ideologies such as
Nordicism and
Aryanism. The connotation of the term
Aryan was detached from its proper geographic and linguistic confinement as a
Indo-Iranian branch of
Indo-European language family by this time. The inequality of races and the notion of a "superior race" was universally accepted by the scholars of this era, therefore race was referred to "national character and national culture" beyond biological confinement. In 1853, Arthur de Gobineau published
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he originally identified the Aryan race as the white race, and the only civilized one, and conceived cultural decline and
miscegenation as intimately intertwined. He argued that the Aryans represented a superior branch of humanity, and attempted to identify the races of Europe as Aryan and associated them with the sons of
Noah, emphasizing superiority, and categorized non-Aryan as an intrusion of the
Semitic race. According to him, northern Europeans had migrated across the world and founded the major civilizations, before being diluted through racial mixing with indigenous populations described as racially inferior, leading to the progressive decay of the ancient Aryan civilizations. In 1878, German American anthropologist
Theodor Poesche published a survey of historical references attempting to demonstrate that the Aryans were light-skinned blue-eyed blonds. In 1899,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain published what is described as "one of the most important proto-Nazi texts",
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in which he theorized an existential struggle to the death between a superior German-Aryan race and a destructive
Jewish-Semitic race. In 1916,
Madison Grant published
The Passing of the Great Race, a polemic against interbreeding between "Aryan" Americans, the original
Thirteen Colonies settlers of British-Irish-German origin, with immigrant "inferior races", which according to him were,
Poles,
Czechs, Jews, and
Italians. The book was a best-seller at the time. While the Aryan race theory remained popular, particularly in
Germany, some authors opposed it, in particular
Otto Schrader,
Rudolph von Jhering and the ethnologist
Robert Hartmann, who proposed to ban the notion of Aryan from anthropology. The term was also adopted by various
occultists and
esoteric ideological systems of this era, such as
Helena Blavatsky, and
Ariosophy. == Nazism ==