To whatever physical race or races they [the Aryans] belonged, they must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by the… - Vere Gordon Childe

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To whatever physical race or races they [the Aryans] belonged, they must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by their community of speech. To their linguistic heirs, they bequeathed, if not skull types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and more precious spiritual identity... [T]he Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture.

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About Vere Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 1892 – 19 October 1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London, and wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world.

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Alternative Names: V. Gordon Childe Gordon Childe V. G. Childe
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Additional quotes by Vere Gordon Childe

Aryan people first emerge from the gloom of prehistory on the northern borders of the Fertile Crescent of the Ancient East... So it is clear enough that the dynasts installed on the Upper Euphra­ tes by 1400 B.C. were Aryans, closely akin to those we meet in the Indus Valley and later in Media and Persia... (the first Aryans were racially Nordics and) the Nordic's superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language. (Childe 1926: 16,19,212)

The simplest explanation of the presence of a Centum language in Central Asia would be to regard it as the last survivor of an original Asiatic Aryan stock. To identify a wandering of Aryans across Turkestan from Europe in a relatively late historical period is frankly difficult.

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How precisely did the Aryans achieve all this? It was not through the superiority of their material culture. We have rejected the idea that a particular genius resided in the conformation of Nordic skulls. We do so with all the more confidence that, by the time the Aryan genius found its true expression in Greece and Rome, the pure Nordic strain had been for the most part absorbed in the Mediterranean substratum: the lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither a higher material culture nor a superior physique, but that which we mentioned in the first chapter—a more excellent language and the mentality it generated. . . . At the same time the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language. (pp. 211–212)

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