Aryan
[5] Similarly, according to the Avesta, the Iranian peoples used the term to designate themselves as an ethnic group and to refer to a region called Airyanem Vaejah (Avestan: 𐬀𐬫𐬭𐬌𐬌𐬀𐬥𐬆𐬨 𐬬𐬀𐬉𐬘𐬀𐬵, lit.
In any case, many modern scholars point out that the ethos of the ancient Aryan identity, as it is described in the Avesta and the Rigveda, was religious, cultural, and linguistic, and was not tied to the concept of race.
[13] In Nazi Germany, and also in German-occupied Europe during World War II, any citizen who was classified as an Aryan would be honoured as a member of the "master race" of humanity.
[17] The term Arya was first rendered into a modern European language in 1771 as Aryens by French Indologist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who rightly compared the Greek arioi with the Avestan airya and the country name Iran.
A number of scholars, starting with Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875), have proposed to derive arya- from the reconstructed PIE term *h₂erós or *h₂eryós, variously translated as 'member of one's own group, peer, freeman'; as 'host, guest; kinsman'; or as 'lord, ruler'.
[28][29] In any case, the Indo-Iranian ethnic connotation is absent from the other Indo-European languages, which rather conceived the possible cognates of *arya- as a social status (a freeman or noble), and there is no evidence that Proto-Indo-European speakers had a term to refer to themselves as 'Proto-Indo-Europeans'.
[27][43] Linguistic evidence show that Proto-Indo-Iranian (Proto-Aryan) speakers dwelled in the Eurasian steppe, south of early Uralic tribes; the stem *arya- was notably borrowed into the Pre-Sámi language as *orja-, at the origin of oarji ('southwest') and årjel ('Southerner').
[57][58][59] In the words of Indologist Michael Witzel, the term ārya "does not mean a particular people or even a particular 'racial' group but all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms (such as ritual, poetry, etc.)".
[60] In later Indian texts and Buddhist sources, ā́rya took the meaning of 'noble', such as in the terms Āryadésa- ('noble land') for India, Ārya-bhāṣā- ('noble language') for Sanskrit, or āryaka- ('honoured man'), which gave the Pali ayyaka- ('grandfather').
Following conflicts between Manichean universalism and Zoroastrian nationalism during the 3rd century CE, however, traditionalistic and nationalistic movements eventually took the upper hand during the Sasanian period, and the Iranian identity (ērīh) came to assume a definite political value.
[73] The stem airya- also appears in Airyanəm Waēǰō (the 'stretch of the Aryas' or the 'Aryan plain'), which is described in the Avesta as the mythical homeland of the early Iranians, said to have been created as "the first and best of places and habitations" by the god Ahura Mazdā.
[61][74] The Sasanian Empire, officially named Ērān-šahr ('Kingdom of the Iranians'; from Old Persian *Aryānām Xšaθram),[75] could also be referred to by the abbreviated form Ērān, as distinguished from the Roman West known as Anērān.
[22][61][76] Alania, the name of the medieval kingdom of the Alans, derives from a dialectal variant of the Old Iranian stem *Aryāna-, which is also linked to the mythical Airyanem Waēǰō.
[77][8][66] Besides the ala- development, *air-y- may have turned into the stem ir-y- via an i-mutation in modern Ossetian languages, as in the place name Iryston (Ossetia), here attached to the Iranian suffix *-stān.
[89] During the 19th century, through the works of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Christian Lassen (1800–1876), Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875), and Max Müller (1823–1900), the terms Aryans, Arier, and Aryens came to be adopted by a number of Western scholars as a synonym of '(Proto-)Indo-Europeans'.
[92][45][31] However, the atrocities committed in the name of Aryanist racial ideologies during the first part of the 20th century have led academics to generally avoid the term 'Aryan', which has been replaced in most cases by 'Indo-Iranian', although its Indic branch is still called 'Indo-Aryan'.
[104][105] In 1868, Theodor Bensen proposed that the Aryans originated in Europe, and that some migrated to Asia to establish ancient Eastern civilisations, which later degenerated through racial mixing on the fringes.
[106] In the early-20th century, German scholar Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), attempting to connect a prehistoric material culture with the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, contended on archaeological grounds that the 'Indo-Germanic' (Indogermanische) migrations originated from a homeland located in northern Europe.
[13] Until the end of World War II, scholarship on the Indo-European Urheimat broadly fell into two camps: Kossinna's followers and those, initially led by Otto Schrader (1855–1919), who supported a steppe homeland in Eurasia, which became the most widespread hypothesis among scholars.
[113] Christian Lassen (1800–1876), a student of Schlegel, had glorified the Aryans as "the most gifted" and "perfect in talent", contrasting them with Semites and laying the groundwork for a racial dichotomy between the two groups.
[110] In the tradition of Lassen's 'Aryan–Semitic' dichotomy, French orientalist Ernest Renan (1823–1892) portrayed 'Semites' as 'non-Aryans', and the Aryans as the master race destined to shape human destiny.
[115][113] Chamberlain's work was highly influential, leading German Emperor Wilhelm II to mandate that his book be required reading for school teachers in training.
[13] Race mysticists like Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) and Julius Langbehn (1851–1907) regarded Aryans as nature-bound, unspoilt Germanics (Urgermanen), detached from modern materialism and liberalism.
[120] Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief ideologue, expanded on the idea of an ancient Nordic migration in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), portraying old Persians as "Aryans with northern blood" who eventually degenerated due to intermixing with so-called 'lower races'.
[122] Its president, Walther Wüst, believed that the Germans were directly descended from the Aryan 'Nordic race', which spread into Asia until racial mixing led to 'degeneration' (Entartung) and 'denordification' (Entnordnung).
[109] But an increasing number of Western writers, especially anthropologists and non-specialists influenced by Darwinist theories, came to see the Aryas of the Rigveda as a 'physical-genetic species' contrasting with the other human races – rather than as an ethnolinguistic category.
[129][130] During the late-19th and early-20th centuries, noted anthropologists Theodor Poesche and Thomas Huxley quoted from the Rigveda to suggest that the Aryans were blond and tall, with blue eyes and dolichocephalic skulls.
[135] In India, the British colonial government had followed de Gobineau's arguments along another line, and had fostered the idea of a superior 'Aryan race' that co-opted the Indian caste system in favor of imperial interests.
[136][137] Translating the sacred Indian texts of the Rig Veda in the 1840s, German linguist Friedrich Max Muller found what he believed was evidence of an ancient invasion of India by Hindu Brahmins, a group which he called "the Arya."
Scholars such as John Batchelor, Armand de Quatrefages, and Daniel Brinton extended this invasion theory to the Philippines, Hawaii, and Japan, identifying indigenous peoples who they believed were the descendants of early Aryan conquerors.
