THE ETHNOGENESIS OF THE ARYANS

or

To Be an Aryan, or Not to Be

 

The English word "Aryan" is derived from the ancient Avestan and Sanskrit word, arya, meaning "noble ones." It is the etymological root form of the modern word "Iran" and its cognates (Aryan > Arian > Eran > Iran). Similarly, it is the root of many of the known dialectical self-designations (autonyms) of a number of historical peoples that descended from the Yamna Culture (ca. 4000-2500 BCE), a late Neolithic archeological-linguistic group that had, by about 3000 BCE, come to encompass most of the Pontic-Caspian steppes in what is today Ukraine and Russia. Horses were first domesticated by several groups that were the antecedents of the Yamna Culture, but the Yamnaya are believed to be the first humans to develop horse-based nomadism. Many of the ethnic groups descended from the Yamna Culture recognized their linguistic and cultural similarities, and sometimes considered each other ethnic kin. Many shared myths and legends that tied them to a common semi-mythological homeland—Aryana/Ariana/Aryavarta/Airyanem Vaejah (Old Iranian/Latinized Greek/Sanskrit/Avestan, "Land of the Aryans" or "Expanse of the Aryans")—although ancient authors variously identified its location in Central Asia or northern India. The ancient Persians seem to have identified it with the area known today as the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex (BMAC)—encompassing modern northern Afghanistan, eastern Turkmenistan, southern Uzbekistan, and western Tajikistan—centered between the Amu Darya (a.k.a., Avestan, Vakhsh, Sanskrit, Vaksu, Latinized Greek, Oxus, Middle Persian, Wehrod) and Syr Darya (a.k.a., Avestan, Yahksha Arta, Latinized Greek, Jaxartes) rivers. Sanskrit sources of the Indo-Aryan peoples, on the other hand, identified it with northern India, but ancient Greek and Roman writers tended to use it much more broadly, essentially referring to all of the territory lying between the Aral Sea in the north (modern southern Kazakhstan) and the Indus River in the south (modern Pakistan), and from the Caspian Sea in the west to the Himalayas in the east. However, as modern archeology, linguistics, and genetics have made clear, the Persian and Indo-Aryan usages seem to have placed the location of Aryana/Airyanem Vaejah in locations that mark where each of these groups first emerged as distinct sub-groups of the Aryans, and may not actually correspond to the ultimate "original homeland" (urheimat) of the Aryans. Modern historians have tentatively correlated these legends with what we think we know about the Yamna Culture, which makes the Pontic-Caspian steppe the probable homeland of the language and culture of the Aryans.

 

Unfortunately, the name "Aryan" became closely linked with the social philosophy/pseudo-science of eugenics during the modern era, including the odious racial theories of the Nazis, which were based on misunderstandings regarding the archeological and linguistic evidence linking Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages and cultures. Based on the works of several nineteenth century physical anthropologists—particularly Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882 CE) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927 CE)—proponents of eugenics theorized that there were three human races—whites, blacks, and yellows—and that whites originated in Siberia, yellows in the Americas, and blacks in Africa. Arthur de Gobineau, in particular, was heavily influenced by the biological taxonomy of the human race developed by the eighteenth century German philosopher, Christoph Meiners (1747-1810 CE), who divided the human race into three taxa—Caucasoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids—and the linguistic work of the German philologist, Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900 CE), who is believed to have been the first modern writer to refer to an "Aryan Race" as a distinct linguistic group. Arthur de Gobineau and Christoph Meiners both considered the white/Caucasian race to be superior to the others in various respects, and de Gobineau explicitly correlated whites/Caucasians with Aryans. Arthur de Gobineau believed that the whites/Caucasians/Aryans were driven from Siberia when Paleolithic yellows/Mongoloids migrated into Asia across the Bering land bridge that formed soon after the late Pleistocene Ice Age. He suggested that the whites/Caucasians/Aryans divided into three groups that migrated into Europe (the Japhetic peoples), southwestern Asia (the Semitic peoples), and North Africa (the Hamitic peoples). In this scheme, each of these groups were equated to the descendants of the sons of Noah in the Bible (Shem, Ham, and Japheth). De Gobineau and others theorized that the Semites and Hamites gradually became polluted by miscegenation (i.e., interracial procreation). Miscegenation was also the ultimate downfall of those groups of Caucasians/Aryans left behind in Central Asia, as well as the Japhetic peoples that settled in eastern and southern Europe, so that by the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, only those white groups that had retreated to the furthest and most isolated areas of Europe (Scandinavia, Germany, and parts of the British Isles) remained "pure." De Gobineau misconstrued Müller's concept of an Aryan Race, however, equating it with his Meiners-influenced concept of the white/Caucasian race as a cultural expression of biology. Indeed, although Müller admitted that anthropology and linguistics could be mutually complementary, he insisted that they were (and should remain) distinct disciplines, and he firmly refuted the idea that either could be linked to biology. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century several pseudo-sciences (e.g., phrenology and eugenics) and philosophical movements (e.g., theosophy and ariosophy) attempted to define the parameters of perceived ethno-biological divisions within the human race—most of these were thinly disguised attempts to justify the socio-political order of the day by suggesting that the apparent ascendancy of whites was the product of innate superiority. By the early twentieth century, writers like Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931 CE), Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (1891-1968 CE), Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946 CE), and Carleton Stevens Coon (1904-1981 CE) had shifted the discussion further by suggesting that Nordic Europeans were in fact the purest whites, who constituted a "Master Race" (die Herrenrasse or das Herrenvolk). Further, these writers could not countenance the thought that the Aryan Race could have originated in Asia, or that pure Aryans could have been driven out by lesser peoples—who were labeled "subhumans" (untermenschen)—and so they misconstrued/misinterpreted the mounting body of evidence that linked Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages and cultures to mean that the Aryan Race had originated in Germany, and that they had expanded into western Europe, southern Europe, and eastern Europe during the mass migrations of Germanic peoples (the Völkerwanderung) that occurred around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. As has happened with some modern creationist groups, the early proponents of eugenics completely underestimated the antiquity of the human race, and therefore they also underestimated the lengths of time involved in the processes of ethnogenesis upon which they expounded. Bizarrely, the "Vedic Aryans" were considered to be a group related to the Goths, an East Germanic group that was believed to have expanded as far east as India, where they settled down and became diluted by indigenous sub-human races (which is why Indians don't look like Germans). Indeed, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (1900-1945 CE), head of the Nazi SS and one of the primary architects of the genocide committed by the Nazis in WWII, apparently carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita—the ancient Sanskrit text that records, in mythologized form, the Indo-Aryan invasion of northern India—and claimed that it was part of his inspiration (i.e., the Indo-Aryans basically carried out a genocide against the indigenous Dravidian peoples of India). Once again, despite the transposition of the Aryan migrations from earlier eugenics theorists (i.e., saying they expanded from Europe to Asia, instead of from Asia to Europe), later proponents of eugenics continued to be deeply concerned by the idea that the Aryan Race outside Germany, Scandinavia, France, and Britain had become diluted by various sub-human groups (particularly, Slavs, Jews, Arabs, Turks, Berbers, and Moors). Due to the undoubted contributions of the Mediterranean peoples to western civilization, as well as the unmistakeable references to Celts in classical literature (i.e., as a people distinct from Germans), a parallel theory to eugenics was advanced by writers like Thomas Huxley (1825-1895 CE), Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936 CE), and Joseph Deniker (1852-1918 CE) that asserted that the white/Caucasian/Aryan race was divided into three sub-groups—the Nordics/Teutonics (Aryans), the Melanochroi (Mediterraneans), and the Occidentals (Celts). In this view, the blood of the Melanochroi were initially pure (the Greeks and Romans), but they had been gradually diluted by Hamitic (Moors and Berbers), Semitic (Arabs and Jews), and Mongoloid (Turks) peoples with the collapse of the Roman Empire (indeed, this was seen as one of the causes of that collapse), while the Celts had been subjected to similarly unseemly processes of miscegenation in central Europe, resulting in the Slavic and Baltic peoples. Only those Romano-Celtic groups that lived in remote areas (i.e., the British Isles), the Gallo-Roman population, and the North and West Germanic peoples remained pure. In this view, the East Germanic peoples (e.g., the Goths, Vandals, and other minor groups) fell victim to miscegenation in eastern Europe, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, and North Africa, which was why these peoples had disappeared by the end of the Dark Ages. The mixing of the Celtic and Germanic peoples in France and the British Isles following the collapse of the Roman Empire—and during the Viking Age—was seen, in this light, as the coming together of the two ancient pure strains of the Aryans that remained at those times (i.e., the Nordics/Teutonics, the Gallo-Romans, and the Britons). Once again, this patently served the purpose of accomodating the status quo as it existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when France, Germany, and Britain emerged as colonial superpowers, and whites in North America and Australia were rapidly extirminating and assimilating the indigenous populations in fulfilment of their belief in manifest destiny. The many threads of "scientific racism" were ultimately used to justify several of the most horrific excesses of modern human history, from justification of slavery in the Americas, to the apartheid regime in South Africa, to the "Final Solution" (German, Endlösung) of the Nazi genocide in World War II—the Holocaust (from the Greek, holókauston, literally meaning, "wholly burned" or "utterly destroyed"), also known as the Shoah (Hebrew, "Calamity").

 

As a result, since World War II ethnologists have eschewed "Aryan" in favor of the term "Iranian," and linguists have coined the terms "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European" to emphasize the historical interrelationship of a family of languages that includes the modern languages of Europe, as well as those in use in parts of western (Albanian, Hittite, Mitannic, Armenian), central (Iranian and Nuristanic), and southern (Hindic and Urdu) Asia. Although "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" have fallen out of favor with modern ethnologists (with good reason), and the general notion that phenotypical isomorphic racial categorization of humans (as subspecies) is now considered to be scientifically unsound (for even better reasons), "Caucasian" persists (for no apparent reason), and some fringe groups (e.g., Neo-Nazis and the Alt-Right) insist on projecting these discredited ideas into their own esoteric philosophies. Unfortunately, the continuing struggle to refute socially, historically, and scientifically atavistic philosophies has driven the study of ethnogenesis (i.e., the formation and development of ethnic identity) and ethnology (i.e., comparing and contrasting different cultures) into the shadows of modern higher education (and the approach to these topics in primary and secondary education is laughably simplistic). Similarly, modern anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists have become extremely averse to any attempts at correlating their findings to historically attested peoples—the synthesis of data from anthropology, archeology, linguistics, and history to come up with theories regarding the origins and evolution of socio-ethnic groups is often viewed as a "slippery slope" that leads too-easily to racism. However, it is that kind of epistemological synthesis that has long intrigued me, and I believe that an objective approach to such synthesis may in fact be the best way to refute racism—the more one looks at the growing body of archeological, anthropological, linguistic, genetic, and historical evidence garnered through modern techniques, the more one is struck by the absolute silliness of any ideas regarding racial or ethnic purity (i.e., biological essentialism). I did a lot of work on the ethnogenesis of the Germanic and Celtic peoples when I was a graduate student, I have extended this interest to my amateur studies in my private life (I'm not a teacher)—which studies have taken me well beyond the Germanic and Celtic peoples—and I have incorporated my findings in the information presented for various cultures on this website. I disagree with some of the excessively politically correct terms that have gained widespread credence today because they are confusing and inaccurate and essentially try to refute racist theories by ignoring them (and changing the terms that may lead to uncomfortable conversations). Of particular relevance to my purposes in this essay, the modern Indian and Iranian ethnicities are not direct correlates to the ancient Aryans, being more complex modern cultural aggregates, and the ancient group that can most accurately be correlated to the ancient Aryans—the Yamna Culture—encompassed the Pontic-Caspian steppes (modern Ukraine and Russia) and the Trans-Ural Plain (the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia), not Iran or India, both of which were merely the ultimate destination of two major Aryan groups during two major pre-historic migrations. By extension, it thus becomes inaccurate and confusing to refer to Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages because some of these languages are not Indian, European, or Iranian (these are all very broad modern aggregates). Using the term, "Aryan," and its variants in their proper epistemological context potentially resolves this problem. I would respectfully add that deliberate obfuscation of historically accurate terms is not the best way to combat racism—if we act like there is something to hide, we only feed the beliefs of the ignorant that there are "secret truths" behind the official history, and that we are afraid to confront those truths. The only way to combat the manufacturers of doubt is to speak openly and frankly, and to allow objective truth to do its work (i.e., many will always choose to see what they want to see, but by obfuscating the words/facts we confuse even those that might otherwise be brought to an objective understanding). I have an affinity for the Aryan peoples (the real ones), several are featured on this site, and I think it is high time to resurrect the more historically accurate terms rather than continue to allow our language to be hijacked by the historiographical fallacies and discredited racial theories of the past. I hope you will agree.

 

One of the things immediately obvious from an objective analysis of the evidence, and one of the reasons I think it is important to speak frankly about these matters, is that it reveals the dangers of projecting subjective beliefs into the analysis of history—basically putting the cart before the horse. Although one certainly needs a working hypothesis as a starting point, one needs to allow the ultimate formation of an objective understanding to proceed from the evidence, not to try to make the evidence fit the theory. This is basically the difference between objective truth and subjective truth—objective truth attempts to identify, as much as possible, the truth of a fact as it exists outside the individual biases of any given observer. We have seen great refinements in the methodology known as the scientific method in the last century, and this methodology is increasingly being applied to some of the humanities, where there is a wealth of data, although the collection of that data has often been unsystematic, and the analysis often lacking in objectivity. In history, the term historiography is usually used in reference to the methodology of history and its synthesis with corroborating or disproving evidence gained from other disciplines (e.g., archeology, linguistics, genetics, geography, etc.). Therefore, when talking about the identity of the ancient Aryans, it is probably best to begin at the beginning. The Neolithic Period (ca. 10,000-4500 BCE) overlaps with the Chalcolithic Period (ca. 5000-2000 BCE) in northern European pre-history. These periods saw the emergence of human cultures that domesticated plants and animals for the first time, established permanently or seasonally inhabited settlements, sustained themselves through agriculture and/or animal husbandry in addition to hunting and foraging, and practiced metallurgy to construct new and better tools (the Chalcolithic Period is derived from the Greek words, khalko and lithos, meaning "copper" and "stone," which gives us "Copper-Stone Age" or more usually "Copper Age"). The Neolithic populations that emerged in various parts of the world were the descendants of early homo sapiens who spread out from Africa—between 130,000 and 77,000 years ago—during the Paleolithic Period, settling on every continent except Antarctica. The traditional theory is that this migration came about as the result of stresses placed on the populations of flora and fauna by the glaciation of much of the landmass of the planet during the Pleistocene Epoch/Ice Age—as sustenance became more scarce, early human populations moved widely in search of abundance and, helped in part by low sea levels (which created land bridges in various parts of the world) and increasing technological sophistication (e.g., the use of fire, the making of clothing and shelters, and the construction of boats/rafts), they established a number of widely dispersed and distinct "islands" of human habitation in Africa, Eurasia, Austronesia, and the Americas. When the period of glaciation ended, these relatively isolated groups seem to have re-established contact with neighboring human groups very quickly, and the Neolithic Period saw the emergence and interaction of a dizzying array of different "culture groups" and "language groups" as they are defined by modern archeologists and linguists. The Copper Age and the Bronze Age (ca. 3300-600 BCE) are the great periods of foundational ethnogenesis in which we can see the emergence of many historically recognized ethnic groups. It is important to note that when archeologists speak of culture groups, they are generally only speaking of perceived patterns of material goods production and use, and a cultural horizon is the geographical and temporal delineation of an area in which archeological sites have been identified that pertain to a given culture group, and over what span of time the material culture seems to have predominated. When linguists refer to language/linguistic groups or linguistic horizons, they similarly speak of the same geographical and temporal delineations, but pertaining to the development and spread of languages. Neither has any genetic association, and cultural and linguistic horizons are notoriously difficult to correlate (e.g., sometimes there may be traces of a language that was spoken by the inhabitants of a given geographical area, but archeology reveals that that same geographical area was home to several material cultures that may or may not have any common elements). Ethnicity was once seen purely as the product of breeding, but in modern scientific parlance and practice, this is now considered to be part of the study of genetics, while ethnology is the study of perceived human identity(ies), and ethnogenesis is essentially the study of the history of perceived human identity(ies). Technically, ethnogenesis is the study of "the formation and development of an ethnic group" through the accumulation of "common markers" that create a sense of "group identity." Ethnogenesis is usually forged through shared interactions with the physical environment (e.g., all those living in a given region have made similar social and technological adaptations to the same environmental factors), the development of a common language or cluster (based on the fundamental human need to communicate with neighbors), and shared cultural norms (religion, social organization, production and exchange of material goods) that result from regular and sustained interaction of the individuals within a given geographical expanse (i.e., the cultural horizon). By necessity, because we do not have access to time machines (or temporal scrying devices), the study of the formation and development of ancient cultures, especially pre-literate ones, requires a degree of inference, deduction (both inductive and abductive), and ambiguity—speaking in terms of absolute certainty being the surest signs of a fool. Some tend to view this intellectual honesty as a liability, and as we have seen above, the desire to impose certainty on something as deeply personal as perceptions of biological, social, and ethnic identity has led many, many people down the primrose path. That being said, I think I am ready to discuss what we think we know about the ethnogenesis of the Aryans.

The Neolithic Period saw the emergence of several archeological cultures in eastern Europe, although there are really only four that are of direct relevance to our purposes here—the Bug-Dniester (6300-5500 BCE), Dnieper-Donets (5000-4200 BCE), Sredny Stog (5000-3500 BCE), and Samara (ca. 5500-3800 BCE) cultures. Archeological cultures are usually named after the modern place names of the locations of the first site(s) attributed to a given culture or the modern regions throughout which such sites have been discovered. In this case, the Bug-Dniester Culture is so-named because the common markers of its norms of material culture production, use, and exchange have been identified from a number of sites spread across the steppes (i.e., grasslands) between the Southern Bug River (a.k.a., the Hypanis or Boh) and the Dniester River (a.k.a., the Tyras or Danister)(modern Moldavia and western Ukraine). The Dnieper-Donets Culture lay to the east of this, between the Dnieper River (a.k.a., the Borysthenes or Danapr) and the Donets River (a.k.a., the Tanais or Donetz)(modern eastern Ukraine and southeastern Russia). The Sredny Stog Culture lay further east along the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, between the Donets River and the Lower Volga River (a.k.a., Ra or Ranha). Finally, the Samara Culture was centered within the Samara Bend (a great bend in the middle portion of the Volga River), to the northeast of the Sredny Stog Culture, although it extended as far west as the vicinity of modern Moscow and as far southeast as the Ural River (a.k.a. the Yaik). These are believed to be the first human cultures to have domesticated horses—previously, there is evidence that wild horses were hunted for meat and skins and bones for tools, but during this period (ca. 5000-4000 BCE) we begin to see evidence and technologies associated with domesticated horses (e.g., tack, corrals with the remains of horse dung, horses and chariots interred in human graves, horse images as totems, and skeletal remains of horses that reveal selective breeding for desired traits). The Bug-Dniester and Dnieper-Donets cultures merged into the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture (ca. 4800-3000 BCE), which also expanded to the south into northeastern Romania. Similarly, the Sredny Stog and Samara cultures gave way to the Yamna Culture (3800-2000 BCE), which in turn expanded to the east, past the Ural Mountains and onto the Baraba Steppe (southwestern Siberia). By about 3000 BCE, the Yamna Culture had also absorbed most of the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture (as far as the Bug). Unfortunately, we do not know how the expansion of the Yamna Culture occurred—whether it was a process of relatively peaceful acculturation between neighboring groups or if it was a conquest (or a combination of both). What we know is that the material culture of the Yamnaya seems to have replaced the other material cultures of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe in several stages—the modern theory that describes this gradual expansion is called the Kurgan Theory, and the Yamnaya are sometimes called the Kurgans, a name that is taken from the barrow burial practices of the Yamna Culture (these barrows were called kurgans by early modern Russian archeologists). The Yamnaya are also believed to be the originators of the proto-Indo-European language, today only known through linguistic reconstruction. Using the comparative method, linguists perform a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, in order to extrapolate back to infer the properties of that ancestor. By using this method, modern linguists can both reconstruct a probable model of the parent language, and they can correlate this with historical and archeological data to trace ancient migration patterns, trade routes, and cultures that influenced each other. The Yamnaya/Kurgans were extremely influential, and we can trace the expansion of Yamnaya/Kurgan cultural practices, along with the evolution of Indo-European languages, ultimately well beyond the steppes of eastern Europe. Indeed, as we will see, the Yamna Culture is the most likely candidate for being the location of the legendary Aryan homeland (urheimat). The Yamnaya/Kurgans were the first peoples to develop horse-based nomadism, and their extreme mobility vis-a-vis the other sedentary cultures of central and western Europe, central Asia, and northern Asia allowed them to expand rapidly in all directions at the dawn of the Bronze Age in Europe (ca. 3500-1400 BCE). Once again, we are not exactly certain what the nature of these expansions may have been—modern genetic analysis has indeed shown that in many cases there was relatively large-scale movement of peoples into different regions, but it is also obvious that the power and influence of the Aryans (as I will now call them) meant that they enjoyed high prestige everywhere they settled, and that neighboring peoples were influenced by them regardless of whether they were invaders or simply neighbors. One must keep in mind that at this time, the entire population of the world was quite low (less than ten million), and central and western Europe, central Asia, and northern Asia had very low population density. Thus, although the expansion of the Aryans seems almost impossible to conceive—Aryan and Aryan-derived cultures came to encompass a geographical range that included almost all of Europe and most of Asia (excepting the taiga and tundra, Mongolia, China, Japan, and southeast Asia)—and the sheer number of cultures that either arose out of branches of the Aryan family tree or were heavily influenced by them is somewhat boggling, but I think it becomes more understandable when one puts it in demographic perspective (i.e., such an expansion would have been much more difficult in later ages, when the world population was higher and most of these regions had higher population densities).