The Behistun Inscription, engraved high on the side of Mount Behistun in the Kermanshah Province of Iran – contains the oldest epigraphically-attested reference to an Iranian language. Dating to the 6th century BC, it describes itself as having been composed “in ariya” – i.e. in Iranian. Picture credit - Hamid Najafi.

The word “Aryan” has become inseparable from poisonous Nazi doctrine over the last century, in which it became a term for describing a supposed master race of non-Jewish Caucasians, usually having Nordic features. It’s ironic when you consider “Aryan” was originally a perfectly innocent ethno-linguistic term for an ancient cultural group who couldn’t have been any different in appearance to the supposedly racially pure peoples of northern Europe the Nazis envisioned.

Far from being blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned and homogenous, the “Aryans” were a dark-skinned nomadic Eurasian tribe who spread from Central Europe and Central Asia into Southern Asia, interbreeding with a variety of other peoples. Our knowledge of these “Aryans” is sketchy, and there’s still a lot to be determined about them, both through anthropological and archaeological research. But we can be quite sure that they bore no direct relation to the modern inhabitants of Germany and Scandinavia. And certainly they were no master race.

“Aryan” is no longer in use as a technical term – because of its inherent political-incorrectness and its Nazi overtones, it’s been superseded by “Indo-Iranian.” However, it’s useful to be aware of the way “Aryan” was gradually manipulated by misguided western scholars and Nazi propagandists, so as to understand how – in the hands of a megalomaniac so expert at twisting facts to suit his murderous rationale as was Adolf Hitler – a simple word misinterpreted can be a dangerous thing indeed.

The Original “Aryans”

“Aryan” originates from the Sanskrit word arya or ariya, which can be observed in a variety of ancient texts, most notably the Vedas – the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature, dating to possibly as early as 1500 BC. It’s been interpreted as having a variety of different meanings – civilized, noble, superior or a person of higher consciousness.

It was used as a term of self-designation by nomadic Indo-Iranian tribes of Indo-European descent in the prehistoric period. Indo-European refers to an enormous family of several hundred related languages and dialects, from which derive most major tongues spoken in Europe, the Iranian plateau and South Asia today. The Indo-Iranians were the easternmost sub-branch of this huge group. They inhabited parts of modern Iran, Afghanistan and India.

The name Iran is in fact a modern cognate of “Aryan,” meaning “lands of the Aryans.” The Behistun Inscription – engraved high on the side of Mount Behistun in the Kermanshah Province of Iran – contains the oldest epigraphically-attested reference to an Iranian language. Dating to the 6th century BC, it describes itself as having been composed “in ariya” – i.e. in Iranian. (Learn more about the Behistun Inscription in this “face-off” vs. the Rosetta Stone).

In 18th century western theory, the Indo-Iranians somehow came to be considered as the forbears of the entire Indo-European language group. How did this happen? In short, Western scholars began making a number of wildly inaccurate assumptions, innocently in some cases, lazily in others, and with malice in others still.

How “Aryan” Became Twisted by Western Scholars

“Aryan” first entered the western lexicon in the 1700s and 1800s with the translation of the Vedas. At this point it was a harmless linguistic term for describing a certain cultural group. Its connection to an “Aryan race” wasn’t implicit. That shift occurred gradually throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, at the hands of Western, mainly European, academics.

It was German Indo-Europeanist scholar Friedrich Schlegel who set this line of reasoning in motion. Writing in 1808, he developed a theory linking arya to the German word ehre, meaning “honour.” He also connected it to early Germanic names containing the element ario, such as the Germanic warrior Ariovistus. Ariovistus was the heroic leader of an alliance of Germanic tribes who, in the 1st century BC, were defeated by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Vosges, as documented in Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico.

At this stage in 19th century linguistic theory, there was an assumption that the age of a language reflected its relative superiority. Since Sanskrit was, at the time, the oldest known Indo-European language (Hittite has since been discovered to be older) it was considered the strongest, and Schlegel believed that he had established some proof that this “Aryan” language was connected directly with German language. He postulated that “Aryan” had been what the entire Indo-European language family called themselves – something along the lines of “the honourable people.” However, he also insisted that India was the cradle of western civilization, and that the pattern of migration had been from India to Europe.

Others picked up on this notion and twisted it around, eventually causing “Aryan” to become synonymous with “Indo-European,” permitting the formulation of the racialist theory of the “Aryan master race.” A notoriously influential document was French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855), in which he argued that there were three main races – white, black and yellow – and that all other races were caused by miscegenation. The white, northern European “Aryans” were the master race, because they had remained the most pure.

It was Austrian linguist Karl Penka who, in 1886, founded Nordic race theory – the belief that the “Aryans” originated from Scandinavia. From there, he made the small leap to suggesting that their defining attributes were blonde hair and blue eyes. French anthropologist and eugenic theorist Georges Vacher de Lapouge, in his 1899 book L'Aryen et son rôle social (‘The Aryan and his Social Role’), took this notion a step further, and posited a belief that these “dolichocephalic-blonde” peoples were natural leaders, destined to rule over brachiocephalic (short-skulled) homo-sapiens. An archetypal group of these short-skulled humans, wrote Lapouge, were the Jews.

The remains of the once-massive Indus Valley city-settlement of Mohenjo-Daro. Archaeological evidence from the site, which was abandoned very suddenly between 1900 and 1700 BC, has been used to support the idea that "Aryans" eradicated the Indus civilization.

The Aryan Invasion Debate

Feeding into the “Aryan” racial polemic was a persistently popular theory, first put forth by the German Indologist Friedrich Max Müller (who is credited with being the first writer to speak of an "Aryan race" in English) and others in the mid 19th century, as a means of explaining the existence of Indo-European languages in India.

The theory goes that the “Aryans,” spilling out of the steppes of Eurasia on horseback and chariot (the expansion of Indo-Iranian culture is closely associated with the emergence of the chariot), invaded the Indian subcontinent sometime around 1700 BC, conquering the ancient Indus civilization – a highly advanced and urbanised Bronze age people of the native Indian Dravidian language group – precipitating their downfall. The “Aryans” then became the dominant regional power, and their descendents later produced the Vedas – the early Sanskrit documents mentioned above.

This is most likely a myth. Archaeological discoveries at the massive Indus Valley city-settlement of Mohenjo-Daro have proven that an extremely sophisticated Bronze Age culture did indeed flourish there, before ending very suddenly around 1900-1700 BC. Genetic evidence, meanwhile, does yield evidence of people of Indo-European-speaking origin diffused throughout the Indian subcontinent. However, much more likely this was a consequence of migration rather than invasion, and it was natural disasters that devastated Mohenjo-Daro – a drought followed by an intense flood.

The fact that the Vedic manuscripts make no mention of Mohenjo-Daro and Indus valley civilization is often put forward as evidence that an invasion did take place, with an Indo-European civilization completely supplanting the vanquished Indus valley natives. But if there had been a triumphant conquest – of a primitive nomadic people over such an evidently advanced and civilised culture as the Indus civilization – wouldn’t it be boasted of in the Vedic manuscripts?

Moreover, the Indus civilization never did actually collapse altogether – it continued to flourish in other areas. Recent archaeological evidence shows that many of the so-called “Indus River” valley peoples lived on the Sarasvati River – associated by archaeologists with the Ghaggar-Hakra River, which flows intermittently through northern India and Pakistan during monsoon season. It’s mentioned in the Vedic manuscripts as a homeland.

Yet the Nazis loved this myth and its ideology of conquest, especially the part about fairer-skinned “Aryans” subjugating darker-skinned Dravidians. Though it would have greatly saddened Müller – who had never intended for a racial dimension to be drawn from what was a purely linguistic argument – the Nazis seized upon the concept of these supposedly superior “Aryans” as support for their belief that the Germans were the rightful masters of the modern world, and possessed a genetic entitlement to subjugate the Semitic religions – Jews and other untermensch (literally “under men”).

Gustaf Kossinna and the Crystallization of Nazi Racial Ideology

Gustaf Kossinna was a leading German archaeologist and linguist in the early 20th century. His theories were seized upon eagerly by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who used them as tools to create a racialist framework to support their genocidal actions in the 1930s and 40s.

The work of Gustaf Kossinna – a linguist and professor of archaeology and German prehistory at the University of Berlin between 1904 and 1927 – was instrumental in aiding Adolf Hitler to develop his vision of the “Aryan master race” into a political-military agenda.

Kossinna was a highly respected and influential voice in his field in pre-war Europe, and actually made some useful early inroads in the development of cultural-historical approach to archaeology. Yet – motivated by a crude political agenda – he had an unfortunate habit of going to illogical extremes with his theories, not least in his nationalistic assertions about the origins of the Germanic peoples.

Kossinna was the creator of the techniques of Siedlungsarchaologie, or “settlement archaeology.” Basically, he believed that physical remains delineating the limits of a particular culture automatically delineated the limits of an ethnic group. His methods and application of Siedlungsarchaologie were highly problematic, and would come in for heavy criticism. But not before Kossinna was able to use them as the basis for an argument – linked closely to the völkisch movement, an emotional groundswell of interest in German folklore prevalent in the 1920s and 30s – which asserted that the Germanic peoples were a unified ethnic group within Europe, with rights to the territories they had once occupied in ancient times, Poland and Czechoslovakia among them.

In his book Die deutsche Vorgeschichte – eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (‘German Prehistory: a Pre-eminently National Discipline’) Kossinna made the connection between the Germanic peoples and the supposedly racially superior “Aryans.” Any doubt as to Kossinna’s motivation for his ideas can be eliminated by reference to the book’s dedication. “To the German people,” it reads, “as a building block in the reconstruction of the externally as well as internally disintegrated fatherland.”

Adolf Hitler stands behind Herman Göring at a
Nazi Party rally in 1928, three years before they came to power. It was
around this time that the theories of academics such as Gustaf Kossinna
were feeding notions of the "Aryan master race."

Kossinna was a key player in an academic community which provided the Nazi leader and the Third Reich with the necessary ethnocentric tools to develop a notion of Germany as an ancient imperial superpower, superior even to the Romans, for whom mass conquest was as good as a birthright.

Kossina died in 1931, 13 months before Hitler seized power in Germany, and years before he had the chance to witness the horrors the Nazis were to inflict upon Europe and the world in the name of this “science.” He was therefore never able to defend himself or his theories. But it was based on a rationale he had been instrumental in fostering that Czechoslovakia and Poland became the first countries annexed and invaded by the Nazis at the outbreak of the Second World War, in the name of lebensraum – “living space,” for true Germans.

It’s important to note at this point that the whole “Aryan” racial argument was one based unequivocally upon ideology, not science – no solid verifiable evidence for the theory had at any stage been put forward, neither by Penka, nor de Lapouge, nor even Kossina. But it had been sufficient to speed Europe and the world on a catastrophic spiral towards total war, and the Holocaust.

We of course can’t blame the horrors of 1939-1945 on one simple word. Hitler and the Nazis had already long since set their sights upon persecuting and eventually exterminating certain peoples whom they perceived to be their enemies and inferiors; “Aryanism” was but a handy framework to support their cause. Suppose “Aryanism” had never been developed? Hitler was such a master fantasist that he would probably just have created a different rationale for his genocidal actions.

The Jews of course weren’t the only group targeted by the Nazis – they also loathed gypsies, blacks and slavs too. The all-encompassing concept of a Germanic “Aryan master race” meant that they could comfortably position all of these peoples as standing in opposition to their hate-filled belief system. The rest is grim history.

“Aryanism” Today

It’d be pleasing to conclude that “Aryanism”was crushed with the destruction of Nazi Germany and the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945. But sadly, that isn’t true – it still persists among fanatical fringe groups the world over, such as white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

It seems incredible, in the full glare of historical hindsight, that anyone would still believe some of the nonsensical ideas the Nazis used to support their racist doctrine. Take this line on the origins of the “Aryans” by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party chairman, whom Hitler tasked with synthesizing Nazi racial code into a single text, the pseudoscientific treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century (the second most influential book in Nazism after Mein Kampf).

“From a northern centre of creation which,” wrote Rosenberg, “without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape.” So the “Aryans” actually came from the legendary city of Atlantis? (Check out some other insane theories about Atlantis in this blog).

Such utter babble continues to be built upon with new, ever more ridiculous theories even today. One idea circulated by racist quacks, conspiracy theorists and Gnostic religious cults is that the “Aryans” are in fact Nordic aliens. For instance, one such group, the Tempelhofgesellschaft, formed in Austria in the 1990s, claims that – according to “ancient Sumerian manuscripts” – the “Aryans” came to Atlantis from the star Aldebaran. A giant space fleet, they believe, is on its way to Earth from Aldebaran now. When it arrives, claim the Tempelhofgesellschaft, it will join up with Nazi flying saucers hidden in the Antarctic, conquer the world and establish a new world order.

A member of the Minaro or Brokpa tribe, who reside in a remote
corner of the Dha-Hanu valley in northern India. They're believed to be
the last pure descendents of "Aryans." They're identifiable by
their unusual yak-felts hats called shamo, which have hanging
spider-like legs that act as rainspouts. Picture credit - Walter
Callens.

Back on planet earth, modern archaeological and anthropological investigations continue to hammer further nails into the coffin containing the notion of “Aryans” as a racially pure Nordic people. The results of a study carried out on 2000-year-old burial sites in eastern Denmark by scientists from the University of Copenhagen, published in 2008, report evidence of ancient Danes mixing with people from as far afield as Arabia and Siberia. “The concept,” the study concluded, “of a single Scandinavian genetic type, a Scandinavian race that wandered to Denmark, settled there, and otherwise lived in complete isolation from the rest of the world, is a fallacy.”

But what of the true “Aryan” tribes – do their descendents still survive today? Incredibly, yes, according to some scientists. The Minaro, or Brokpa, are a tiny community of just a few hundred people residing in a remote corner of the Dha-Hanu valley in northern India. These hardy mountain people have unusually light skin, high cheekbones and look altogether almost European in appearance. They speak an archaic Indo-Aryan dialect called Shina, which contains numerous words found in modern European languages. French ethnologist, explorer and author Michel Peissel – who has studied them throughout his lifetime – claims that the Minaro are “the last inheritors in Asia of Aryan, pre-Aryan and neolithic traditions.”

They’ve survived for countless generations in isolation and fierce independence, and still live in adobe huts, hunting ibex to survive and practicing archaic rituals such as “washing” with the smoke of burning juniper trees. It’s said that Hitler ordered one of his racial experts to personally survey the Minaro region in 1938, and even considered sending blonde German women to mate with these pure “Aryans.”

The Minaro’s numbers are shrinking all the time, and they’re destined to one day soon disappear into the genetic melting pot of the modern world. They’ll probably never know just how incredibly controversial a role their enigmatic ancient ancestors have played on the stage of modern history.

 http://heritage-key.com/world/nomadic-tribesmen-nazi-icons-who-were-aryans