Aryan Race - 19th-century Physical Anthropology

19th-century Physical Anthropology

In 19th century physical anthropology, represented by some as being scientific racism, the "Aryan race" was defined as the subgroup of the Caucasian (or Europid) race consisting of the native speakers of Indo-European languages descended from the original Proto-Indo-Europeans, that in modern times reside in Northern India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Eastern India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Europe, Asian Russia, Anglo-America, Quebec, Southern South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Armenia, Iran, and in Afghanistan and Tadzhikistan, .

The original 19th-century and early 20th-century use of the term Aryan referred to "the early speakers of Proto-Indo European and their descendents". Max Müller is often identified as the first writer to speak of an Aryan "race" in English. In his Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861 he referred to Aryans as a "race of people". At the time, the term race had the meaning of "a group of tribes or peoples, an ethnic group".

When Müller's statement was interpreted to imply a biologically distinct sub-group of humanity, he soon clarified that he simply meant a line of descent, insisting that it was very dangerous to mix linguistics and anthropology. "The Science of Language and the Science of Man cannot be kept too much asunder ... I must repeat what I have said many times before, it would be wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar". He restated his opposition to this method in 1888 in his essay Biographies of words and the home of the Aryas.

Müller was responding to the development of racial anthropology, and the influence of the work of Arthur de Gobineau who argued that the Indo-Europeans represented a superior branch of humanity. A number of later writers, such as the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book L'Aryen, argued that this superior branch could be identified biologically by using the cephalic index (a measure of head shape) and other indicators. He argued that the long-headed "dolichocephalic-blond" Europeans, characteristically found in northern Europe, were natural leaders, destined to rule over more "brachiocephalic" (short headed) peoples.

The division of the Caucasian race into Aryans, Semites and Hamites is in origin linguistic, not based on physical anthropology, the division in physical anthropology being that into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean. However, the linguistic classification of "Aryan" later became closely associated, and conflated, with the classification of "Nordic" among some archaeologists and anthropologists.

This claim became increasingly important during the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryans originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia. However, by the late 19th century the steppe theory of Aryan origins was challenged by the view that the Aryans originated in ancient Germany or Scandinavia, or at least that in those countries the original Aryan ethnicity had been preserved. The German origin of the Aryans was especially promoted by the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who claimed that the Proto-Indo-European peoples were identical to the Corded Ware culture of Neolithic Germany. This idea was widely circulated in both intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century, and is reflected in the concept of "Corded-Nordics" in Carleton S. Coon's 1939 The Races of Europe.

Other anthropologists contested such claims. In Germany, Rudolf Virchow launched a study of craniometry, which prompted him to denounce "Nordic mysticism" in the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe, while Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated in the same congress that the people of Europe, be they English, German, French, and Spaniard belonged to a "mixture of various races," furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology... against any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race" to others.

Virchow's contribution to the debate sparked a controversy. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a strong supporter of the theory of a superior Aryan race, attacked Josef Kollmann arguments in detail. While the "Aryan race" theory remained popular, particularly in Germany, some authors defended Virchow's perspective, in particular Otto Schrader, Rudolph von Jhering and the ethnologist Robert Hartmann (1831–1893), who proposed to ban the notion of "Aryan" from anthropology.