Who started the Aryan race?

Answer 1

The notion of an "Aryan Race" has been around for a long time. As for "why" they came about, I'm not really sure. Wikipedia says:

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Aryan is an English word derived from the Sanskrit "Ārya" meaning "noble" or "honorable". The Avestan cognate is "Airya" and the Old Persian equivalent is "Ariya". It is widely held to have been used as an ethnic self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Iranians Since in the 19th century, the Indo-Iranians were the most ancient known speakers of Indo-European languages, the word Aryan was adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to Indo-European speakers as a whole.

In Europe, the concept of an Aryan race became influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as linguists and ethnologists argued that speakers of these Indo-European languages constitute a distinctive race, descended from an ancient people, who were referred to as the "primitive Aryans", but are now known as Proto-Indo-Europeans.

In linguistics, Aryan is most often used in the context of the sub-branch of Indo-Iranian languages referred to as Indo-Aryan languages.

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Answer 2

There is no such thing as an "Aryan" race; that is a Nazi term. The word "aryan" is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning "noble" or "honorable." In the late nineteenth century, Europeans began using the word as a description for a group of people - they believed that the original people who spoke the early Indo-European language must have been from a single race. They called this "race" the "Aryan" race. Now, we realize that you cannot base a race upon what language the people speak - you must base it on genetics. Back then, they didn't understand science the way we do now, and they believed in an "Aryan race" who lived in Iraq and India. Max Muller is actually the first person who used the term "Aryan race" in writing, in his article Lectures on the Science of Languagein 1861. Muller himself stated that he did not use the term "race" to mean a separate sub-group of humans, but to refer to a line of descent only. Muller's work led to a big argument among scientists, and many of them started to argue that you could indeed tell "Aryan" people apart from other races. They used measurements of the skull, and divided people up into long-headed (dolichocephalic) and short-headed (brachiocephalic) groups. They then claimed that the long-headed group, which included the so-called "Aryans," were superior to the short-headed group. This argument then led to the claim that the Nordic people of Europe were the original "Aryans," and were thus superior to all other races. The British empire used this idea to ally themselves with ruling castes in India when they conquored that country, and claimed that ancient "Aryans" had invaded India and displaced the darker "Dravidian" people. Spiritualists claimed that the "Aryans" originally came from Atlantis. Hitler and the Nazi Party, far from inventing the "Aryan Race," were actually among the last to try to use the idea to justify their xenophobia.

Answer 3

There is no such thing as the Aryan Race; this was a term invented by Hitler in pseudoscientific racial classification of the world.

The historic Aryans were a tribe of Indo-Europeans who live in the Caucasus Mountains in roughly 1500 B.C.E. This group of people conquered Persia and the Indus River Valley. It was the Aryans who founded the religion of Hinduism through their relationship with the conquered peoples of the Indus River Valley and were the seeds of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. They were of typical Middle Eastern color originally, but after successive intermarriage with the local populations, they have become indistinguishable from the indigenous peoples.

Hitler's Aryan Race was a non-existent fictional group of people who track most closely with the Nordic group of Indo-Europeans. In Hitler's mind, the Aryans were the people who founded the German Tribes and were the forefathers of all of German culture. He held that these Aryans, who could be recognized by their distinct blue eyes and blond hair, were superior beings than other human races. He also appropriated symbols from the historic Aryans, like the swastika, for his Aryan Race.