[Vision2020] On the origin of Aryan

[Kenneth Marcy]

Recently I acquired a copy of the book _The Horse, the Wheel, and 
Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the 
Modern World,_ by David W. Anthony. The book's dust jacket has an 
author photo showing a smiling, balding, bearded, bespectacled man 
who the caption notes is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick 
College, and who has conducted extensive archaeological fieldwork i?n 
Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

My interest in the volume was sparked by my notice of its early 
mention of Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, who wrote in 
1786, the now-famous sentence: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be 
its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the 
Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than 
either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the 
roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have 
been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could 
examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from 
some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

Anthony goes on to ask: "If Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were relatives, 
descended from the same parent language, what was that language? 
Where had it been spoken? And by whom?"

"Proto-Indo-European, the linguistic problem, became "the Proto-Indo-
Europeans," a biological population with its own mentality and 
personality: "a slim, tall, light-complexioned, blonde race, superior 
to all other peoples, calm and firm in character, constantly 
striving, intellectually brilliant, with an almost ideal attitude 
towards the world and life in general." The name Aryan began to be 
applied to them, because the authors of the oldest religious texts in 
Sanskrit and Persian, the _Rig Veda_ and _Avesta,_ called themselves 
Aryans. These Aryans lived in Iran and eastward into Afghanistan-
Pakistan-India. The term _Aryan_ should be confined only to this 
Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. But the Vedas were a 
newly-discovered source of mystical fascination in the nineteenth 
century, and in Victorian parlors the name Aryan soon spread beyond 
its proper linguistic and geographic confines. Madison Grant's _The 
Passing of the Great Race_ (1916), a best-seller in the U.S., was a 
virulent warning against the thinning of superior American "Aryan" 
blood, (by which he meant the British-Scots-Irish-German settlers of 
the original thirteen colonies) through interbreeding with 
immigrant "inferior races," which for him included Poles, Czechs, and 
Italians as well as Jews -- all of whom spoke Indo-European languages 
(Yiddish is a Germanic language in its basic grammar and morphology).

"The gap through which the word Aryan escaped from Iran and the Indian 
subcontinent was provided by the _Rig Veda_ itself: some scholars 
found passages in the _Rig Veda_ that seemed to describe the Vedic 
Aryans as invaders who had conquered their way into the Punjab. But 
from where? A feverish search for the "Aryan homeland" began. Sir 
William Jones placed it in Iran. The Himalayan Mountains were a 
popular choice in the early nineteenth century, but other locations 
soon became the subject of animated debates. Amateurs and experts 
alike joined the search, many hoping to prove that their own nation 
had given birth to the Aryans. In the second decade of the twentieth 
century the German scholar Gustav Kossinna attempted to demonstrate 
on archaeological grounds that the Aryan homeland lay in northern 
Europe -- in fact, in Germany. Kossinna illustrated the prehistoric 
migrations of the "Indo-Germanic" Aryans with neat black arrows that 
swept east, west, and south from his presumed Aryan homeland. Armies 
followed the pen of the prehistorian less than thirty years later.

"The problem of Indo-European origins was politicized almost from the 
beginning. It became enmeshed in nationalist and chauvinist causes, 
nurtured by the murderous fantasy of Aryan racial superiority, and 
was actually pursued in archaeological excavations by the Nazi SS. 
Today the Indo-European past continues to be manipulated by causes 
and cults. In the books of the Goddess movement (Marija Gimbutas's 
_Civilization of the Goddess,_ Riane Eisler's _The Chalice and the 
Blade_) the ancient "Indo-Europeans" are cast in archaeological 
dramas not as blonde heroes but as patriarchal, warlike invaders who 
destroyed a utopian prehistoric world of feminine peace and beauty. 
In Russia some modern nationalist political groups and neo-Pagan 
movements claim a direct linkage between themselves, as Slavs, and 
the ancient "Aryans." In the United States white supremacist groups 
refer to themselves as Aryans. There actually were Aryans in 
history -- the composers of the _Rig Veda_ and the _Avesta_ -- but 
they were Bronze Age tribal people who lived in Iran, Afghanistan, 
and the northern Indian subcontinent. It is highly doubtful that they 
were blonde or blue-eyed, and they had no connection with the 
competing racial fantasies of modern bigots."

"The mistakes that led an obscure linguistic mystery to erupt into 
racial genocide were distressingly simple and therefore can be 
avoided by anyone who cares to avoid them. They were the equation of 
race with language, and the assignment of superiority to some 
language-and-race groups. Prominent linguists have always pleaded 
against both these ideas. While Martin Heidegger argued that some 
languages -- German and Greek -- were unique vessels for a superior 
kind of thought, the linguistic anthropologist Franz Boas protested 
that no language could be said to be superior to any other on the 
basis of objective criteria. As early as 1872 the great linguist Max 
Müller observed that the notion of an Aryan skull was not just 
unscientific but anti-scientific; languages are not white-skinned or 
long-headed. But then how can the Sanskrit language be connected with 
a skull type? And how did the Aryans themselves define "Aryan"? 
According to their own texts, they conceived of "Aryan-ness" as a 
religious-linguistic category. Some Sanskrit-speaking chiefs, and 
even poets in the _Rig Veda,_ had names such as Balbūtha and Brbu 
that were foreign to the Sanskrit language. These people were of 
non-Aryan origin and yet were leaders among the Aryans. So even the 
Aryans of the _Rig Veda_ were not genetically "pure" -- whatever that 
means. The _Rig Veda_ was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If 
you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required 
performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, 
you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The _Rig Veda_ made the 
ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require or even 
contemplate racial purity." [from pages 9-11] [references omitted]


Ken