Aryan

“ It is scarcely probable that the primitively Aryans considered ‘thinking’ to be the essential characteristic of a man. We should rather assume from the earliest Aryan literature, the Old Indian Vedas, that the primitively Aryan felt he was closely allied to the brutes, since the Vedic Indian actually calls himself paçu, ‘beast.’ The literal meaning of Aryan manu-, ‘person,’ can hardly be ascertained now. See Mensch.
mannig, see manch.
männiglich, pronoun ‘everybody,’ from Middle High German manne-gelîch, menneclîch, ‘every’ ”

“ 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. ”

“ But whatever confusion may have arisen in later times in language and in blood, no language could have arisen without speakers, and we mean by Aryas no more than speakers of Aryan languages, whatever their skulls or their hair may have been. An Octoroon, and even a Quadroon, may have blonde waving hair, but if he speaks English he would be classified as Aryan, if Berber as a Negro. But who is injured by such a classification? [33] Let blood and skulls and hair and jaws be classified by all means, but let us speak no longer of Aryan skulls or Semitic blood. ”

“ It may be noted as curious that among the Javanese (a people so remote in blood from what we understand by Aryan) , the word ārya is commonly used as an honorary prefix to the names of men of rank; a survival of the ancient Hindu influence on the civilisation of the island.
The earliest use of Aryan in an ethnic sense is in the Inscription on the tomb of Darius, in which the king calls himself an Aryan, and of Aryan descent, whilst Ormuzd is in the Median version styled, 'God of the Aryans.'
B.C. c. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The Aryan branch includes nearly all the present and past nations of Europe, the Greeks, Latins, Teutons or Germans, Celts and Slavonians; as well as three Asiatic peoples,—the Hindus, the Persians, and the Afghans and the modern Americans. It is the Aryans that have been the parents of new nations, and that have reached the highest point of intellectual development, as shown in their political freedom, and in their science, literature, and art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The name of Aryan has been given to the races speaking languages derived from, or akin to, the ancient form of Sanskrit, who now occupy the temperate zone extending from the Mediterranean, across the highlands of Asia Minor, Persia and Afghanistan, to India. The races speaking the languages akin to the ancient Assyrian, which are now mainly represented by Arabic, have been Aryans. called Semitic, and occupy the countries south-west of Persia, including Syria and Arabia, besides extending into North Africa. ”

“ EARLY CULTURE OF THE ARYANS.—One of the most fascinating studies of recent growth is that which reveals to us the customs, beliefs, and mode of life of the early Aryans, while they were yet living together as a single household. Upon comparing the myths, legends, and ballads of the different Aryan peoples, we discover the curious fact that, under various disguises, they are the same. Thus our nursery tales are found to be identical with those with which the Hindu children are amused. ”

“ If the Aryan speech was imposed by one race upon other and different races, may not the complex of myths and customs which we are accustomed to call Aryan, be likewise the exclusive property of one race, and have been accepted with the Aryan speech by the inferior races whom the Aryans dominated, and upon whom they impressed their civilisation, whether that civilisation be regarded as a special product of the Aryans or as taken over by them from older, presumably Eastern, civilisations? ”

“ The pro-ethnic Aryan's ideas of religion and morals can only be guessed, and how many gods he had, it is impossible to say. It is, however, certain that he worshipped one above all others, if others he had, and that he spoke of him in terms expressive at once of the light of day and of the wide expanse of the sky, which looked down upon him wherever he roamed. ”

“ All then that I wish to put clearly before you is this, that the Aryan man, who had to fulfil his mission in India, might naturally be deficient in many of the practical and fighting virtues, which were developed in the Northern Aryans by the very struggle without which they could not have survived, but that his life on earth had not therefore been entirely wasted. His very view of life, though we cannot adopt it in this Northern climate, may yet act as a lesson and a warning to us, not, for the sake of life, to sacrifice the highest objects of life. ”

“ These sketches of the early Aryan certainly attest more vigour than refinement; and it takes some effort to realise that those who lived in this way had already made much progress, and that these early arts and institutions were full of promise. Savage as the early Aryan is, he is better than his neighbours, and has made a good start in the way of civilisation. ”

“ It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109) , for in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. ”

“ But whether the story is a mythic interpretation by Aryans of non-Aryan practices, or a non-Aryan tradition, varied, as soon as it became the property of the Aryan, to suit Aryan ideas, it clearly takes us back to practices very remote, to use Mr. Elton's forcible words, from the reverence for the parents' authority which might have perhaps been expected from descendants of "the Aryan household". [20] These practices lead us back to a period of savagery which we are only just beginning to understand. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The hoary antiquity of this ancient monument, the picture it affords of the earliest form of civilization that the Aryans developed in any part of the world, and the flood of light it throws on the origin of the myths and religions of all Aryan nations, make the Rig-Veda deeply interesting. It is, moreover, the oldest work in the Aryan world. It gives us a picture of the oldest civilization that the Aryans developed, and it enlightens and clears up much that is dark and obscure in the religions and myths of Aryan nations all over the world. ”

“ Some writers regard the Aryans as descendants of Japhet, and the Semitic tribes as the progeny of Shem. In the latter they include the Hebrews, the Phœnicians, the Arabs, and Ethiopians; and their [3] languages are radically distinct from those of the Aryan family. The country about the upper Oxus river, now mainly included in the dominions of the Khan of Bockhara, is generally agreed upon as the locality from whence the various members of the Aryan family originally migrated, some northward and westward over Europe, and others southward and eastward into India. ”

“ It is therefore common and more correct to speak of the Iranian family. The original native name of the race which spoke these tongues was Aryan. King Darius is called on an inscription “a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan race”; and the followers of the Zoroastrian religion in their earliest records never give themselves any other title but Airyavō danghavō, that is to say, “Aryan races.” The province of the Iranian language is bounded on the west by the Semitic, on the north and north-east by the Ural-altaic or Turanian, and on the south-east by the kindred language of India. ”

“ It seems very doubtful whether an Aryan emigration from India to China took place at any time. India always offered full scope for all Aryan energies; indeed we know that the Aryans by no means became so universally predominant, even in India, as one might gather from the early and wide extension of their language and religion. If there really is an Aryan element among the tribes of western China it would be curious to speculate on the possibility of its having come by a non-Indian route. ”

“ But with the loss of India the Aryan Way ceased to rule the lives of any Aryan peoples. It is curious to note that while the{v1-441} one great Aryan religion is now almost exclusively confined to Mongolian peoples, the Aryans themselves are under the sway of two religions, Christianity and Islam, which are, as we shall see, essentially Semitic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sanskrit not now regarded as the parent Aryan speech.
(3) The primitive Aryan, a coarse, squalid savage, defending himself against the climate, clad in skins.
(4) Early Aryans' presence in Asia Minor given up: no Aryan names on cuneiform monuments between Kurdistan and the Halys. ”

“ They were a white race; much fairer, at least, than the people who were then occupying Europe and the other parts of Asia. They were strong of body, intelligent and enterprising. They did not live only by hunting and herding, like the nomadic peoples, their neighbors, but cultivated the ground. Their name, Aryan, means honorable, noble ”

“ As every Aryan branch retains the story, or traces of it, there can be no doubt that the belief in swan-maidens, who swam in the heavenly sea, and who sometimes became the wives of those fortunate men who managed to steal from them their feather dresses, formed an integral portion of the old mythological system of the Aryan family, before it was broken up into Indian, Persian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Scandinavian, Teutonic, and other races. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The home of the Aryans, instead of being found in Central Asia, is traced to Europe, so that the Aryan invaders of India, many centuries before Christ, were men of European descent who pushed their way eastward and gradually extended their dominion first over Iran and subsequently over Northern India, having scaled the snowclad Himalayas, literally in search of “fresh fields and pastures new.” When they reached India, after a long sojourn in Eastern countries, they were a mixed European and Asiatic race, with probably a large share of Turanian blood, [7] speaking a language of Aryan origin. ”

“ A few decades ago there was much talk of the English officer and the Hindu in the ranks being of the same Aryan blood, because they both spoke widely diverse forms of the great group of Aryan languages. This, of course, did not imply the slightest trace of blood relationship—the Aryan speech of the Hindu had been imposed upon him by his conquerors from the north. Such fallacies were common a generation ago. ”

“ 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 late, however, many considerations tend to prove that these Aryan nations were by no means one family; they are the product of a mixture of several races among which one has forced its language upon the others. If we call this race the Aryans proper we find that they are represented most purely in the Teutonic nations, the Saxons, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. These Aryans are a tall, blond, and dolichocephalic race. They appear as the conquerors of India, the masters of Persia, the Dorian immigrators of Greece, showing everywhere the same attributes. ”