Aryan Race - Origin of The Term

Origin of The Term

The term Aryan originates from the Sanskrit word ārya, in origin an ethnic self-designation, in Classical Sanskrit meaning "honourable, respectable, noble".

In the 18th century, the most ancient known Indo-European languages were those of the Indo-Iranians' ancestors. The word Aryan was therefore adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to native Indo-European speakers as a whole, including the Greeks, Latins, and Germans. It was soon recognised that Armenians, Balts, Celts, Albanians and Slavs also belonged to the same group. It was argued that all of these languages originated from a common root—now known as Proto-Indo-European—spoken by an ancient people. The ethnic group composed of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their modern descendants was termed the "Aryans".

This usage was common in the late 19th and early 20th century. An example of an influential best-selling book that reflects this usage is the 1920 book The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. Wells wrote about the accomplishments of the Aryan people, stating how they "learned methods of civilization" while "Sargon II and Sardanapalus were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt". As such, Wells suggested that the Aryans had eventually "subjugated the whole ancient world, Semitic, Aegean and Egyptian alike". In the 1944 edition of Rand McNally’s World Atlas, the Aryan race is depicted as being one of the ten major racial groupings of mankind. The science fiction author Poul Anderson (1926–2001), an anti-racist libertarian of Scandinavian ancestry, in his many novels, novellas, and short stories, consistently used the term Aryan as a synonym for Indo-Europeans. He spoke of the Aryan bird of prey which impelled those of the Aryan race to take the lead in developing interstellar travel, colonize habitable planets in other planetary systems and become leading business entrepreneurs on the newly colonized planets.

The use of "Aryan" as a synonym for "Indo-European" or to a lesser extent for "Indo-Iranian", is regarded today by many as obsolete and politically incorrect, but may still occasionally appear in material based on older scholarship, or written by persons accustomed to older usage, such as in a 1989 article in Scientific American by Colin Renfrew in which he uses the word "Aryan" in its traditional meaning as a synonym for "Indo-European". However, the term Indo-Aryan is still commonly used to describe the Indic half of the Indo-Iranian languages, i.e. the family that includes Sanskrit and modern languages such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali.