Aryan race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race Aryan race From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Aryan race was a racial grouping commonly used in the period of the late 19th century to the mid 20th century to describe peoples of European and Western Asian heritage. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race.[1] While originally meant simply as a neutral ethno-linguistic classification, from the late 19th century onwards the concept of the Aryan race has been used by proponents of ideologically-motivated racism and white supremacism such as in doctrines of Nazism and neo-Nazism. Aryanism developed as a racial ideology that claimed that the Aryan race was a master race. Contents 1 Origin of the term 2 19th-century physical anthropology 3 Indo-Aryan migration 4 Occultism 4.1 Theosophy 4.2 Ariosophy 5 Aryanism 5.1 Nazism 5.2 Italian Fascism 5.3 Neo-Nazism 5.3.1 Tempelhofgesellschaft 6 See also 6.1 Philosophical 6.2 Third Reich specific 6.3 Contemporaneous concepts of race 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links Origin of the term Print to PDF without this message by purchasing novaPDF (http://www.novapdf.com/) 1 of 15 07-07-2014 18:43 Aryan race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race The term Aryan originates from the Sanskrit word ārya, in origin an ethnic self-designation, in Classical Sanskrit meaning "honourable, respectable, noble".[3][4] In the 18th century, the most ancient known Indo-European languages were those of the ancient Indo-Iranians. The word Aryan was therefore adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian peoples, but also to native Indo-European speakers as a whole, including the Romans, Greeks, and the Germans. It was soon recognised that Balts, Celts, and Slavs also belonged to the same group. It was argued that all of these languages originated from a The earliest epigraphically-attested common root—now known as Proto-Indo-European—spoken by an ancient reference to the word arya occurs in people who were thought of as ancestors of the European, Iranian, and the 6th century B.C. Behistun Indo-Aryan peoples. The ethnic group composed of the Proto- inscription, which describes itself to Indo-Europeans and their modern descendants was termed the "Aryans". have been composed "in arya This usage was common among knowledgeable authors writing in the late [language or script]" (§ 70). As is also 19th and early 20th century. An example of this usage appears in The the case for all other Old Iranian language usage, the arya of the Outline of History, a bestselling 1920 work by H. G. Wells.[5] In that inscription does not signify anything influential volume, Wells used the term in the plural ("the Aryan peoples"), [2] but he was a staunch opponent of the racist and politically motivated but "Iranian". exploitation of the singular term ("the Aryan people") by earlier authors like Houston Stewart Chamberlain (see below) and was careful either to avoid the generic singular, though he did refer now and again in the singular to some specific "Aryan people" (e.g. the Scythians). In 1922 in A Short History of the World, Wells depicted a highly diverse group of various "Aryan peoples" learning "methods of civilization" and then, by means of different uncoordinated movements that Wells believed were part of a larger dialectical rhythm of conflict between settled civilizations and nomadic invaders that also encompassed Aegean and Mongol peoples inter alia, "subjugat[ing]"—"in The region Aria as depicted by form" but not in "ideas and methods"—"the whole ancient world, Semitic, Waldseemuller in 1507 Aegean and Egyptian alike".[6] But in a climate of burgeoning racism it proved difficult to maintain such nuanced distinctions. Even Max Mueller, a linguist who wrote in 1888 that "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,"[7] was on occasion guilty of using the term "Aryan race."[8] So it was that despite the injunctions of writers like Wells, the notion of an Aryan race took root in mainstream culture. Thus in the 1944 edition of Rand McNally’s World Atlas, the Aryan race is depicted as one of the ten major racial groupings of mankind.[9] The science fiction author Poul Anderson (1926–2001), an anti-racist libertarian of Scandinavian ancestry, in his many novels, novellas, and short stories, consistently used the term Aryan as a synonym for Indo-Europeans. He spoke of the Aryan bird of prey which impelled those of the Aryan race to take the lead in developing interstellar travel, colonize habitable planets in other planetary systems and become leading business entrepreneurs on the newly colonized planets.[10] Today the use of "Aryan" as a synonym for "Indo-European" or to a lesser extent for "Indo-Iranian" both in academia and in popular culture is obsolete, ideologically suspect, and politically incorrect. But the term may still occasionally appear in material that is based on older scholarship or written by persons accustomed to older usage. Thus in a 1989 article in Scientific American, Colin Renfrew uses the term "Aryan" as a synonym for "Indo- European".[11] The term Indo-Aryan is still commonly used to describe the Indic half of the Indo-Iranian languages, i.e. the family that includes Sanskrit and modern languages such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. 19th-century physical anthropology Print to PDF without this message by purchasing novaPDF (http://www.novapdf.com/) 2 of 15 07-07-2014 18:43 Aryan race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race In 19th century physical anthropology, represented by some as being scientific racism, the "Aryan race" was defined as the subgroup of the Caucasian (or Europid) race consisting of the native speakers of Indo-European languages descended from the original Proto- Indo-Europeans, that in modern times reside in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Anglo-America, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Latin America, Iran, Armenia, Maldives, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Northern India, and Nepal.[12] The original 19th-century and early 20th-century use of the term Aryan referred to "the early speakers of Proto-Indo European and their descendents".[13][14] Max Müller is The 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (Leipzig, 1885-1890) shows often identified as the first writer to the Caucasian race (in various shades of grayish blue-green) as comprising speak of an Aryan "race" in English. In Aryans, Semites, and Hamites. Aryans are further subdivided into European his Lectures on the Science of Language Aryans and Indo-Aryans (the term "Indo-Aryans" was then used to describe in 1861[15] he referred to Aryans as a those now called Indo-Iranians). "race of people". At the time, the term race had the meaning of "a group of tribes or peoples, an ethnic group".[16] When Müller's statement was interpreted to imply a biologically distinct sub-group of humanity, he soon clarified that he simply meant a line of descent, insisting that it was very dangerous to mix linguistics and anthropology. "The Science of Language and the Science of Man cannot be kept too much asunder ... I must repeat what I have said many times before, it would be wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar".[17] He restated his opposition to this method in 1888 in his essay Biographies of words and the home of the Aryas.[15] Müller was responding to the development of racial anthropology, and the influence of the work of Arthur de Gobineau who argued that the Indo-Europeans represented a superior branch of humanity. A number of later writers, such as the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book L'Aryen, argued that this superior branch could be identified biologically by using the cephalic index (a measure of head shape) and other indicators. He argued that the long-headed "dolichocephalic-blond" Europeans, characteristically found in northern Europe, were natural leaders, destined to rule over more "brachiocephalic" (short headed) peoples.[18] The division of the Caucasian race into Aryans, Semites and Hamites is in origin linguistic, not based on physical anthropology, the division in physical anthropology being that into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean. However, the linguistic classification of "Aryan" later became closely associated, and Arthur de Gobineau, one of the key conflated, with the classification of "Nordic" among some archaeologists formulators of the theory of the "Aryan and anthropologists. race" This claim became increasingly important during the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryans originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia. However, by the late 19th century the steppe theory of Aryan origins was challenged by the view that the Aryans originated in ancient Germany or Scandinavia, or at least that in those countries the original Aryan ethnicity had been preserved. The German origin of the Aryans was especially Print to PDF without this message by purchasing novaPDF (http://www.novapdf.com/) 3 of 15 07-07-2014 18:43 Aryan race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race promoted by the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who claimed that the Proto-Indo-European peoples were identical to the Corded Ware culture of Neolithic Germany. This idea was widely circulated in both intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century,[19] and is reflected in the concept of "Corded-Nordics" in Carleton S.