We explain what the Aryan race is, the origin of this concept, the controversy over its use and its relationship with Nazism in history.
What is the Aryan race?
The term Aryan race is quite controversial today, due to its use in different racist discourses. throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. However, to know what exactly it refers to, we must first know where the term Aryan or Aryan comes from.
It is a word belonging to one of the oldest Indo-European languages that are known, the classical language of India, the Sanskrit. It is related to the voices airya of the Avestan and ariya from ancient Persian, two languages of the Proto-Indo-Iranian people, that is, the easternmost branch of the Indo-European language family, which are typical of the primitive peoples of Europe, the Middle East and India.
That is why numerous linguists and anthropologists who studied antiquity in the 19th and 20th centuries assumed that “Aryans” was the name by which the ancient peoples who inhabited the region of India and Mesopotamia called themselves, that is, the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians.
This idea was reinforced by the fact that, since ancient times, The ancient practitioners of the religion of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persians, called themselves Aryans. In fact, the name of Iran It means nothing other than “land of the Aryans.” There is also evidence of the use of this term in ancient India, associated with the Vedic civilization of around 1500 BC. c.
Much of this was known in the 19th century, when linguists demonstrated that all modern European languages and a good number of languages from the Middle East and India have a common root, the remote Indo-European language. So too The idea arose that the Aryans had been an ethnically pure and original peoplefrom which the different white races would come.
The “Aryan race” in history
This theory provided remote scientific support for the idea of the difference and superiority of human races.which was very widespread at the time. Thus, it gave rise to numerous racist, nationalist and imperialist modes of thought. There were those who claimed that the Aryans came from the Russian steppes, Scandinavia or even Germany.
This latest version It was of particular interest to Adolf Hitler's fascist regime in the first third of the 20th century, in which the superiority of the Aryan race over the others, and therefore its right to exterminate them, was defended through a political interpretation of Darwin's evolutionary theories.
But the Nazis were not the only ones to use the term to their advantage. For example, in the British Raj In India, the colonial order could be maintained because the British allied themselves with the highest castes of Indian societylargely appealing to a supposed sense of ancestral ethnic belonging, that is, to the fact of supposedly descending from the ancient Aryans.
Much more recent studies insist that, if there were any real descendants of the Aryans, it would be the Indo-European peoples. of the territories of present-day Iran, Afghanistan and Kurdistan. These discoveries were possible in research free of the colonialist or imperialist culture of the time.
That is to say, it would not be exclusively the Germanic peoples, as the Nazis proposed. But since the Aryans lacked writing, it is impossible to know for sure what they called themselves before they divided into different cultural families.
However, thanks to the association of this word with racism and Nazism, it is currently quite discredited. Its use is no longer common even within academic studies of the Indo-European language. The same happened with the swastika, an ancestral symbol of the Aryan peoples, but today associated with intolerance, racist fanaticism and xenophobia.
Continue with: Ancient civilizations
References
- “Aryans” on Wikipedia.
- “Aryan” in the Dictionary of the language of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Aryan race” in Encyclopedia.us.
- “The Aryans. History and ways of life of the Central Asian peoples of the Iron Age” by José Blesa Cuenca at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain).
- “Aryan (people)” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
