Aryan race
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- This article is about the racial theory. For the full range of meanings of "Aryan" see Aryan. For the Hindu spiritual term see Arya.
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 speakers of the Indo-European languages constitute a distinctive "race". In its most notorious incarnation, under Nazism, it was argued that the earliest Aryans were identical to Nordic peoples. 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.
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Origin and Background of the Concept
Image:Hschamberlain2.jpg The word arya first appears in the ancient Indian sacred text the Rigveda and the Iranian Gathas. The Indian and Iranian terms are directly derived from Proto-Indo-Iranian *arya-, apparently a self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Iranians. The term is also continued in Old Persian inscriptions and other Persian sources from c. 500 BCE onwards, the word Iran itself being derived from it (See Airyanem Vaejah). India is also referred to as Aryavarta, which means "the Land of Aryans". Modern Iranians consider their ethnicity and stock as being "Aryan", and in historical Hinduism, the Sanskrit term took on a spiritual meaning of "noble".
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 Romans, Greeks, the Germans, Balts, Celts and Slavs. It was argued that all of these languages originated from a common root - spoken by an ancient people who must have been the ancestors of the European, Iranian, and North Indian people. It should be noted that this usage is obsolete.Template:Fact In English, "Aryan", if used at all, is synonymous to Indo-Iranian, or in particular Proto-Indo-Iranian.
The idea that the north Europeans were the "purest" of these people was later propagated most assiduously 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.
Imperialist, nationalistic and Nazi uses of the term
Image:Hart aryan.gifDuring the 19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryan race originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia, and including the Caucasus Mountains. The Steppe theory of Aryan origins was not the only one circulating during the nineteenth century, however. Many British, American and German scholars argued that the Aryans originated in ancient Germany or Scandinavia, or at least that in those countries the original Aryan ethnicity had been preserved. This idea was widespread in both intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century.
British Raj
In India, under the British Empire, the British rulers also used the idea of a distinct Aryan race in order to ally British power with the Indian caste system. It was widely claimed that the Aryans were white people who had invaded India in ancient times[1], subordinating the darker skinned native Dravidian peoples, who were pushed to the south. Thus the foundation of Hinduism was ascribed to white invaders who had established themselves as the dominant castes, and who were supposed to have created the sophisticated Vedic texts. Much of these theories were simply conjecture fuelled by European imperialism (see white man's burden). This styling of an "Aryan invasion" by British colonial fantasies of racial supremacy lies at the origin of the fact that all discussion of historical Indo-Aryan migrations or Aryan and Dravidian "races" remains highly controversial in India to this day, and does continue to affect political and religious debate. Some Dravidians, and supporters of the Dalit movement, most commonly Tamils, claim that the worship of Shiva is a distinct Dravidian religion, to be distinguished from Brahminical "Aryan" Hinduism. In contrast, the Indian nationalist Hindutva movement argues that no Aryan invasion or migration ever occurred, asserting that Vedic beliefs emerged from the Indus Valley Civilisation, which pre-dated the supposed advent of the Indo-Aryans in India, and is identified as a likely candidate for a Proto-Dravidian culture.
Theosophy
These debates also led to the Theosophical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott at the end of the nineteenth century. This was an early kind of New Age philosophy, that took inspiration from Indian culture, in particular from the Hindu reform movement the Arya Samaj founded by Swami Dayananda. Blavatsky argued that humanity had descended from a series of "Root Races", naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the "Aryan" Race. She thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis and described the Aryan races with the following words: "The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis." (Secret Doctrine, vol.II, p.249).
Blavatsky used "Root Race" as a technical term to describe human evolution over the large time periods in her cosmology. However, she also claimed that there were modern non-Aryan peoples who were inferior to Aryans. She regularly contrasts "Aryan" with "Semitic" culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become "degenerate in spirituality". She also states that some peoples are "semi-animal creatures". These latter include "the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China." There are also "considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc." (The Secret Doctrine vol.II, pp.195-6)
Despite this, Blavatsky's admirers claim that her thinking was not connected to fascist or racialist ideas, asserting that she believed in a Universal Brotherhood of humanity and wrote that "all men have spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is essentially of one and the same essence." (The Key to Theosophy, Section 3). Nevertheless, Guido von List (and his followers such as Lanz von Liebenfels) later took up some of Blavatsky's ideas, mixing her ideology with nationalistic and fascist ideas. Such views also fed into the development of Nazi ideology. However, the theosophical publications such as The Aryan Path were strongly opposed to the Nazi usage, attacking racialism.
Nazism
Image:What is an aryan.jpgThe theory of the Northern origins of the Aryans was particularly influential in Germany. It was widely believed that the Vedic Aryans were ethnically identical to the Goths, Vandals and other ancient Germanic peoples of the Völkerwanderung. This idea was often intertwined with anti-semitic ideas. The distinctions between the "Aryan" and "Semitic" peoples were based on the linguistic and ethnic history described above. In this way Semitic peoples came to be seen as a foreign presence within "Aryan" societies, and the Semitic peoples were often pointed to as the cause of conversion and destruction of social order and values leading to culture and civilization's downfall by Nazi and Pre-Nazi theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg, Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. According to the Nazi ideologists, the Aryan was a master race that built a civilization that dominated the world ten thousand years ago. This alleged civilization declined because the inferior races mixed with the Aryans but it left traces of their civilization in Tibet (via Buddhism), and even Central America, South America, Ancient Egypt.
A complete, and highly speculative and racist theory of Aryan and anti-Syrian and anti-Semitic history can be found in Rosenberg's publication, "Race and Race History". Rosenberg's account of ancient history is very well researched, but his conclusions require great leaps in logic. But the seemingly scholarly nature of such works was very effective in spreading Aryan supremacist theories among German intellectuals in the early 20th century, especially after the first World War. These and other ideas evolved into the Nazi use of the term "Aryan race" to refer to what they saw as being a "master race" of people of northern European descent, going to extreme and violent lengths to "maintain the purity" of this race through a far-reaching eugenics program (including anti-miscegenation legislation, compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally deficient, the execution of the institutionalized mentally ill as part of a euthanasia program, and eventually the systematic targeting of Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals in the Holocaust). This usage now has nearly no meaning outside of Nazi or Neo-Nazi ideology.
Quotations
"I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language… To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar." – Max Müller
Referring to an aforementioned race the British psychologist William McDougall, wrote "Many names have been used to denote this type, but the usefulness of most of them has been spoilt through their application to denote linguistic groups (e.g. Indo-Germanic, Aryan), and by the false assumption that linguistic groups are racial groups." (McDougall, William., The Group Mind, p.159, Arno Press, 1973; Copyright, 1920 by G.P. Putnam's Sons).
"I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects." – J. R. R. Tolkien, responding to a German publisher who was inquiring about the possibility of printing a German translation of The Hobbit
“In Latin malus ... could indicate the common man as the dark one, especially as the black-haired one, as the pre-Aryan dweller of the Italian soil which distinguished itself most clearly through his colour from blonds who became their masters, namely the Aryan conquering race. ... Who can say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for the “commune”, for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack —and that the conqueror and master race, the Aryan, is not succumbing physiologically, too?” – Friedrich Nietzsche The Genealogy of Morals
“It is quite in order that we possess no religion of oppressed Aryan races, for that is a contradiction: a master race is either on top or it is destroyed.” (The Will to Power, 145)
"I am Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men, King in this great earth far and wide, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenian, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage." – Darius the Great of the Persian Empire
External links
- The Aryans in a historical context
- ÂRYÂ (ARYAN) Philology of Ethnic Epithet of Iranian Peoples
- Aryans
- The myth of the "Aryan tribe" (nornirsaett.de)
Template:Epochsbg:Арийска раса
fr:Race aryenne
he:הגזע הארי
nl:Arische ras
pt:Raça ariana