Aryan race

“ I assert nothing beyond their language when I call them Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, and Slavs, and in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians.... To me an ethnologist who speaks of an 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. ”

“ Slowly and painfully, with many misfortunes and many reversions, the Aryan race has steadily moved forward in the march of culture, and every branch of the race has contributed its part. Every great artisan and artist, every great statesman, every great linguist, every great philosopher, every great thinker in all that time, has contributed his part ”

“ That portion of the ancient Aryan race which poured from the central plain of Asia, through the rocky defiles of what we now call “The Frontier,” to populate the fertile lowlands of India, had gods who must once have been wholly heroic, but who came in time to be more degraded than the most vicious of lustful criminals. And the Greeks, Latins, Teutons, Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry. ”

“ Aryan, in scientific language, is utterly inapplicable to race. It means language and nothing but language; and if we speak of Aryan race at all, we should know that it means no more than x + Aryan speech." Thus does Professor Max Müller tell us that in attempting to reconstruct an ideal social unity for the Aryan race we must not look for aid to ethnology. ”

“ It cannot be denied, however, that they are open to attack from various sides. In the first place, there is the preliminary question whether there is an Aryan race-group and consequently an “Aryan epic tradition” at all. ”

“ At the back of this unsettled question lies the interesting subject of the civilisation of pre-Aryan races on the European-Asiatic Continent. In the Newer Stone Age this continent was inhabited by races of short stature, with long and narrow skulls, and probably dark complexions, races whom the Aryans, a tall, round-skulled, fair-complexioned race, conquered, and with whom they so largely intermingled that the varieties of fair and dark people in Europe at this day, speaking an Aryan language, are past finding out. Indeed, there are probably no unmixed races throughout Europe and Asia ”

“ It was suggested, also, that if the Aryan intruders, entering Europe from the East, encountered and absorbed a population resembling the American aborigines, the fact would account for the great change which the Aryan speech underwent in Central and Western Europe. It would also account for the remarkable change which took place in the character of the intruding race. The Aryans, who in the East have always been a submissive and contemplative race, devoid of the idea of popular government, became, in Europe, a high-spirited, practical, and liberty-loving people. ”

“ The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word "Arya," meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history. ”

“ According to the evidence of their languages, there must have been a time and a place, in the remote past, when and where a primitive Aryan race, which was ancestral to all these nations, lived and multiplied until it outgrew its original country and began to send forth successive "swarms," or migrating hordes, as many unsettled races have been seen to do within the historic age. {991} It is hopeless, perhaps, to think of determining the time when such a dispersion of the Aryan peoples began ”

“ In reality, the hypothesis of the fair-haired “Aryan race,” tall and dolichocephalic (Fig. 88) , indigenous to Europe, does not rest on a firmer foundation than that of the “Aryan race” coming from Asia.
Anthropology is powerless to say if the ancient owners of the dolichocephalic skulls in Southern Europe spoke an Aryan language or not. ”

“ Moreover, the works of modern philologists, with Oscar Schrader [366] at their head, show that we can no longer speak to-day of an “Aryan race,” but solely of a family of [Pg 319] Aryan languages, and perhaps of a primitive Aryan civilisation which had preceded the separation of the different Aryan dialects from their common stock. ”

“ It is now contended that there is no such thing as an Aryan race in the same sense that there is an Aryan language, and the question of late so frequently discussed as to the origin of the Aryans can only mean, if it means anything, a discussion of the ethnic affinities of those numerous races which have acquired Aryan speech ”

“ Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. ”

“ As it is assumed that all Aryans were blond and traced descent through males, so it is held that all Europeans, who are dark-complexioned, and whose forefathers traced descent through women, are non-Aryan in race, and that, although they now in almost every case speak an Aryan tongue, this is not their primitive speech, but simply that learned from their Aryan conquerors. ”

“ Aryan languages are spoken by people of the most diverse racial types; nevertheless there are scientists who try to identify the blond north-European with the ancient pure Aryan, and who claim for the race pre-eminent hereditary gifts, because the people who at present and in our concept are the leaders of the world speak Aryan languages. ”

“ Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life [pg 127] to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. ”

“ Half the human race, having surmounted savagery, have been arrested in an immobile type of civilization, as in ancient Egypt, modern China, and in the East generally. It is only in the Aryan race, with the Jews and Magyars, that we can find evidences of a persistent tendency to progress; and that there is no inherent race tendency at work in this is shown by the fact that some of the Aryans, as the Hindoo, and Persians, are among the most unprogressive of men. ”

“ IN our school days most of us were brought up to regard Asia as the mother of European peoples. We were told that an ideal race of men swarmed forth from the Himalayan highlands, disseminating culture right and left as they spread through the barbarous West. The primitive language, parent to all of the varieties of speech—Romance, Teutonic, Slavic, Persian, or Hindustanee—spoken by the so-called Caucasian or white race, was called Aryan. By inference this name was shifted to the shoulders of the people themselves, who were known as the Aryan race. ”

“ It is quite proper to speak of Aryan "people," because, as we have seen, the existence of the language implies that of a people who speak it; it might be equally permissible to call Latin people all those who speak Romance dialects. But, just as the application of the term Latin "race" to the divers people who speak Romance languages, at the present day, is none the less absurd because it is common; so it is quite possible that it may be equally wrong to call the people who spoke the primitive Aryan dialects and inhabited the primitive home, the Aryan race. ”

“ Primitive Aryan Civilisation.
"There is no Aryan race in blood, but whoever, through the imposition of hands, whether of his parents or his foreign masters, has received the Aryan blessing, belongs to that unbroken spiritual succession which began with the first apostles of that noble speech, and continues to the present day in every part of the globe. ”

“ And from this undisputed fact it is an inevitable inference that these various races contain, along with other elements, a race-element in common, due to their Aryan pedigree. That the Indo-European races are wholly Aryan is very improbable, for in every case the countries overrun by them were occupied by inferior races, whose blood must have mingled in varying degrees with that of their conquerors; but that every Indo-European people is in great part descended from a common Aryan stock is not open to question. ”

“ Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. ”

“ And their judgment was often unconsciously warped by strong monogenistic proclivities, which at bottom, however respectable and philanthropic their origin, had nothing to do with science. So the patent fact that men of Aryan speech presented widely diverse racial characters was explained away by maintaining that the physical differentiation was post-Aryan; to put it broadly, that the Aryans in Hindoo-Koosh-Pamir were truly of one race ”

“ We are not to invent an ideal 'Aryan,' and then to explain all his traces of savagery as borrowings by him from some unknown prior race. There is no reason at all for supposing that the peoples who speak languages called, for convenience, 'Aryan,' were better bred than any other peoples at the beginning. ”

“ It is enough to say that men of acknowledged authority in science (Pott, Grimm, Max Müller) have maintained for a long time, without any solid proof, the existence not only of a primitive Aryan language, which gave birth to the dialects of nearly every people of Europe, but also of an “Aryan race,” supposed to have sprung up “somewhere” in Asia, one part migrating towards India and Persia, while the remainder made its way by slow stages to Europe. ”

“ The problem of the cradle of the Aryan race will probably never be solved with certainty. Airyana-vaejah, 'the stem-land of the Aryans,' is spoken of as the first of the good lands created by Ahura Mazda. ”

“ It is maintained, therefore, that the relationship of the Aryan peoples is not one of race but only of language and of culture; the word Aryan denotes no more than a certain type of speech, and of accompanying civilisation, which spread over all the peoples in question at a very early time. ”

“ Nothing could antecedently be more improbable than the suggestion that they were; and we might fairly regard it as refuted even if we had nothing to go on but the literary character of the tales. They bear the stamp of the genius of more than one race. The pure and placid but often cold imagination of the Aryan has been at work on some. In others we trace the more picturesque fancy, the fierceness and sensuality, the greater sense of artistic elegance belonging to races whom the Aryan, in spite of his occasional faults of hardness and coarseness, has, on the whole, left behind him. ”

“ Now if the story were confined to the Aryan race, we might account for its diffusion, by supposing it to be the common heritage of the Indo-European peoples, carried everywhere with them in their wanderings. But when the tale is found in Madagascar, North America, Samoa, and among the Finns, while many scattered incidents occur in even more widely severed races, such as Zulus, Bushmen, Japanese, Eskimo, Samoyeds, the Aryan hypothesis becomes inadequate. ”

“ It is interesting to note the significance of this Phœnician background, with its universal commerce. The Phœnician traded already in remote antiquity with the extremes of the Aryan race, from India in the East to Britain in the West, including the whole intervening line of Aryan migration, Persia, Greece, Italy, Gaul. The Aryan race is indeed a separative, self-repellent, distracted race, always on the move out of itself, without returning into itself. ”

“ The Aryan division spreading out from the Caucasus Mountains by way of India, and thence westward, became split up into a hundred different races, with varying peculiarities and racial differences, becoming as they are today English, German, French, Irish, Scotch, Swedes, Finns, Russians, Hindus, and a hundred other varying races that have intermingled until the Aryan designation as a division of the human race is entirely lost. ”

“ This theory, however, has pretty well broken down, since it has been shown that other branches of the Aryan languages, specially the Lithuanian, contain more archaic elements than either Sanscrit or Zend; that language is often no conclusive test of race; that Aryan migrations have quite as often or oftener been from west to east than from east to west; and that all history, prehistoric traditions, and linguistic palæontology point to the principal Aryan races having been located in Northern and Central Europe and in Central and 412 Southern Russia very much as we find them at the present day. ”

“ The first incursion of the fair Aryans from the northwest settled down, it is claimed, in the northern portions of the country. They gradually mingled and intermarried with the dark-skinned Dravidian and aboriginal population, with the natural [94] consequence of a loss of race-purity and of whiteness of complexion. A subsequent descent of a new Aryan host upon the plains of northern India found the descendants of their predecessors of darker hue than themselves, which bespoke their race degeneracy ”