[Vision2020] On the origin of Aryan

[deb]

Fascinating! Thanks, Ken!
Debi Robinson-Smith
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenneth Marcy" <kmmos1 at verizon.net>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 20, 2010 11:47 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] On the origin of Aryan


> Recently I acquired a copy of the book _The Horse, the Wheel, and
> Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the
> Modern World,_ by David W. Anthony. The book's dust jacket has an
> author photo showing a smiling, balding, bearded, bespectacled man
> who the caption notes is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick
> College, and who has conducted extensive archaeological fieldwork i?n
> Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
>
> My interest in the volume was sparked by my notice of its early
> mention of Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, who wrote in
> 1786, the now-famous sentence: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be
> its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the
> Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than
> either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the
> roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have
> been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could
> examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from
> some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."
>
> Anthony goes on to ask: "If Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were relatives,
> descended from the same parent language, what was that language?
> Where had it been spoken? And by whom?"
>
> "Proto-Indo-European, the linguistic problem, became "the Proto-Indo-
> Europeans," a biological population with its own mentality and
> personality: "a slim, tall, light-complexioned, blonde race, superior
> to all other peoples, calm and firm in character, constantly
> striving, intellectually brilliant, with an almost ideal attitude
> towards the world and life in general." The name Aryan began to be
> applied to them, because the authors of the oldest religious texts in
> Sanskrit and Persian, the _Rig Veda_ and _Avesta,_ called themselves
> Aryans. These Aryans lived in Iran and eastward into Afghanistan-
> Pakistan-India. The term _Aryan_ should be confined only to this
> Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. But the Vedas were a
> newly-discovered source of mystical fascination in the nineteenth
> century, and in Victorian parlors the name Aryan soon spread beyond
> its proper linguistic and geographic confines. Madison Grant's _The
> Passing of the Great Race_ (1916), a best-seller in the U.S., was a
> virulent warning against the thinning of superior American "Aryan"
> blood, (by which he meant the British-Scots-Irish-German settlers of
> the original thirteen colonies) through interbreeding with
> immigrant "inferior races," which for him included Poles, Czechs, and
> Italians as well as Jews -- all of whom spoke Indo-European languages
> (Yiddish is a Germanic language in its basic grammar and morphology).
>
> "The gap through which the word Aryan escaped from Iran and the Indian
> subcontinent was provided by the _Rig Veda_ itself: some scholars
> found passages in the _Rig Veda_ that seemed to describe the Vedic
> Aryans as invaders who had conquered their way into the Punjab. But
> from where? A feverish search for the "Aryan homeland" began. Sir
> William Jones placed it in Iran. The Himalayan Mountains were a
> popular choice in the early nineteenth century, but other locations
> soon became the subject of animated debates. Amateurs and experts
> alike joined the search, many hoping to prove that their own nation
> had given birth to the Aryans. In the second decade of the twentieth
> century the German scholar Gustav Kossinna attempted to demonstrate
> on archaeological grounds that the Aryan homeland lay in northern
> Europe -- in fact, in Germany. Kossinna illustrated the prehistoric
> migrations of the "Indo-Germanic" Aryans with neat black arrows that
> swept east, west, and south from his presumed Aryan homeland. Armies
> followed the pen of the prehistorian less than thirty years later.
>
> "The problem of Indo-European origins was politicized almost from the
> beginning. It became enmeshed in nationalist and chauvinist causes,
> nurtured by the murderous fantasy of Aryan racial superiority, and
> was actually pursued in archaeological excavations by the Nazi SS.
> Today the Indo-European past continues to be manipulated by causes
> and cults. In the books of the Goddess movement (Marija Gimbutas's
> _Civilization of the Goddess,_ Riane Eisler's _The Chalice and the
> Blade_) the ancient "Indo-Europeans" are cast in archaeological
> dramas not as blonde heroes but as patriarchal, warlike invaders who
> destroyed a utopian prehistoric world of feminine peace and beauty.
> In Russia some modern nationalist political groups and neo-Pagan
> movements claim a direct linkage between themselves, as Slavs, and
> the ancient "Aryans." In the United States white supremacist groups
> refer to themselves as Aryans. There actually were Aryans in
> history -- the composers of the _Rig Veda_ and the _Avesta_ -- but
> they were Bronze Age tribal people who lived in Iran, Afghanistan,
> and the northern Indian subcontinent. It is highly doubtful that they
> were blonde or blue-eyed, and they had no connection with the
> competing racial fantasies of modern bigots."
>
> "The mistakes that led an obscure linguistic mystery to erupt into
> racial genocide were distressingly simple and therefore can be
> avoided by anyone who cares to avoid them. They were the equation of
> race with language, and the assignment of superiority to some
> language-and-race groups. Prominent linguists have always pleaded
> against both these ideas. While Martin Heidegger argued that some
> languages -- German and Greek -- were unique vessels for a superior
> kind of thought, the linguistic anthropologist Franz Boas protested
> that no language could be said to be superior to any other on the
> basis of objective criteria. As early as 1872 the great linguist Max
> Müller observed that the notion of an Aryan skull was not just
> unscientific but anti-scientific; languages are not white-skinned or
> long-headed. But then how can the Sanskrit language be connected with
> a skull type? And how did the Aryans themselves define "Aryan"?
> According to their own texts, they conceived of "Aryan-ness" as a
> religious-linguistic category. Some Sanskrit-speaking chiefs, and
> even poets in the _Rig Veda,_ had names such as Balbūtha and Brbu
> that were foreign to the Sanskrit language. These people were of
> non-Aryan origin and yet were leaders among the Aryans. So even the
> Aryans of the _Rig Veda_ were not genetically "pure" -- whatever that
> means. The _Rig Veda_ was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If
> you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required
> performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language,
> you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The _Rig Veda_ made the
> ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require or even
> contemplate racial purity." [from pages 9-11] [references omitted]
>
>
> Ken
>
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