Who Were The Real Aryans Before The Name Got Co-Opted By Racists?

[Judi Lynn]

Who Were The Real Aryans Before The Name Got Co-Opted By Racists?
The myth that became a powerful part of Nazi ideology is still with us, so who were the real Aryans before they got muddled in this nonsense?

Russell is a Science Writer with IFLScience and has a PhD in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology

DR. RUSSELL MOUL
Science Writer
Published
June 9, 2023

The idea of the “Aryan race” has been discredited for decades and is now synonymous with racism, notions of racial superiority, and hyper-nationalism. While many may reject it as a bygone designation for a supposed “type” of people, there are still plenty of misunderstandings associated with the term's origins and where it came from.

The “real” Aryans
A few thousand years before modern ideologies co-opted the term for their nationalist uses, around 1700 BCE, a group of nomadic peoples migrated into the Indian subcontinent from prehistoric Iran. The civilizations living in the area at the time, the Indus Valley civilizations, called these travelers ārya, the word from which we get “Aryan” today.

The Indus Valley civilizations (also known as Harappa or Sarasvati) were extremely advanced for their time. They had a written language, as well as farming capabilities, and lived in urban settlements. However, so the myth goes, when the Aryans arrived, they destroyed this ancient civilization and wiped out their culture. These invaders then went on to write the classic Indian literature and religious texts, such as the Vedas.

In reality, the Aryans were not an invading horde bent on destruction. There is no archaeological evidence to support this, and it seems that their migration was more gradual. The likely cause of the decline of the Indus Valley civilizations was due to environmental factors. In particular, floods and droughts probably disrupted their agricultural practices, which eventually collapsed their economy and social order. This allowed the Aryans to settle and pick up in their place.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/who-were-the-real-aryans-before-the-name-got-co-opted-by-racists-69333

[brush]

1. How the hell did a grounp of migrating people from the Indian sub-continent...

most certainly brown-skinned, become in Germanic lore, the blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned, super-human idols the nazis worshipped and aspired to be?

Just racist, disinformation...same as the white supremacist crap that persists in trump/magat/lost cause idiocy of today.

[MMBeilis]

2. How the hell, indeed. The Nazis needed a creation myth, so the invented one, without, it seems....

.....doing much research. Probably just trying to put as much distance as they could between them and Jewish folk.

[wnylib]

4. See my #3.

[wnylib]

3. Aryans were not the "brown skinned" people of India.

They were from what is now called Iran. Aryans is the term given to them by the brown people of India.

The language family that we now call Indo-European used to be called Indo-Aryan. Germanic languages are part of the Indo-European linguistic group. Therefore, Germans claimed to be direct biological descendants of the "original white people."

But of course, language does not equal biology. Look at how many people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds spoke Latin at the time of the Roman Empire. Latin is one of the Indo-European languages. Look at how many people in various parts of the world speak English today, which is also an Indo-European language (a subset of Germanic languages).

The linguistic similarities between extinct Latin and Sanskrit (extinct language of India) had just recently been studied and publicized when Hitler chose Aryan for the designation of a "super race." He mistakenly believed that, since the I-E language family covered such a large area, it indicated a huge ancient white empire that spawned later white empires like Rome. Most (but not all) modern European languages are either Latin based or Germanic. Therefore, the supposed superiority of fascist Italians and Nazi Germans.