It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific out­ look, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology.

The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future. The “Aryan” colony of India came to have a special place in this context. The scholars' racist at­titude made them seek evidence in the Vedic texts that the ancient Aryan immigrants (aryas) had had a racial consciousness, and that the caste society was a kind of apartheid system from the very beginning. But reference to the higher castes as “Aryan brothers" could also be used for humanitar­ian aims. By referring to the relationship between Europeans and Indians, people imagined that they could more easily reform the Hindu culture and modernize or “Indo-Europeanize" Indian society. (310-11)

This brief historical discussion indicates that the Indo-European or Indo-Aryan concept was intimately connected with other social, cultural, and political movements from the 18th to the 20th centuries. In Europe, it was tied to the attempt to distinguish a Christian heritage from that of the Jews. Once formulated, it underwent social and political changes climaxing in what was Nazi Germany.

The fundamental thesis of this study is that these prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were, to use the word of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think with," rather than because they were meaningful historical actors. The interest in the "Indo-Europeans," "Aryans" and their "others" (who have varied through history from Jews to savages, Orientals, aristocrats, priests, matriarchal peasants, warlike nomads, French liberals, and German nationalists), stemmed-and still stems-from a will to create alternatives to those identities that have been provided by tradition. The scholarship about the Indo-Europeans, their culture, and their religion has been an attempt to create new categories of thought, new identities, and thereby a future different from the one that seemed to be prescribed (Arvidsson 2006, p. xi)."

The concept of an Indo-European or Indo-Aryan group of peoples has played a prominent role in interpretative studies of Old World history and archaeology. For almost 200 years, scholars and quasi scholars have attributed the linguistic, cultural, and racial affiliations of very disparate groups to a common Indo-Aryan heritage. In such widely seperated areas as Europe and India, many significant cultural changes recorded for the first and second millennia B.C. are attributed to an influx, or invasion, of Indo-Aryan peoples who shared a common cultural base and who were responsible for important socioeconomic and linguistic changes in the areas they invaded.

With the help of the measurements and speculations of racial anthropology, a “Japhetic,” "Aryan,” or “Indo-European” race was gradually chiseled out. A number of scholars—Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Max Müller, Christian Lassen, Adolphe Pictet, H. S. Chamberlain, Paul Broca, Karl Penka, and Hans F. K. Günther, to name a few —described the Indo-Europeans as blond, blue eyed, tall, with straight (leptorrhine) noses, straight (orthognathous) profiles and long, narrow (dolichocephalic) skulls. Now the Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke Indo-European languages, but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteris tics. Indians, Persians, Greeks. Romans, Celts, Germans, Slavs, and Balts were now different parts of the same organic whole: the Aryan race. 43

However the main reason why scholarship about the Indo-Europeans has tended to produce myths is that so many who have written (and read) about it have interpreted it as concerning their own origin : "We all have a need to understand," writes, for example Danish scholar of Iranian studies, Jes P. Asmussen, "What our Indo-European" forefathers felt and thought." The research on the Indo-Europeans has created a "web of scientific myths," to use Vernant's phrase, because it has dealt with "our origins" and hence, about the way "we" should do things. However, as we shall see later on, there have been many scholars who have resisted presenting the Indo-Europeans as "our true ancestor"—some (scholars of Jewish ancestry) because the Indo-Europeans could not possibly have been their forefathers, and others because they disproved of the mythologization for various reasons, even though they themselves might have been defined as "Indo-Europeans," (Arvidsson 2006, p.8, emphasis in the original).

The "primitivization" of the Indo-Europeans was also stimulated by the fact that the Indo-Europeans were decreasingly linked to high-cultural India.. It is revealing that Hermann Hirt, probably the foremost philologist of the turn of the century, claimed that "many Indo-Iranian concepts should rather be traced to Babylon than to the Indo-Germans." Instead the Indo-Europeans were now increasingly associated with Germanic barbarians (Arvidsson 2006, p.176).

The existence of a group of people called Indo-Europeans or Vedic Aryans has achieved the status of received wisdom—it has been repeated so often that it is now accepted fact, despite there being no satisfactory archaeological evidence whatsoever to support the presence of an incoming group of such numbers as historical and archaeological explanations require.

The existence of a group of people called Indo-Europeans or Vedic Aryans has achieved the status of received wisdom—it has been repeated so often that it is now accepted fact, despite there being no satisfactory archaeological evidence whatsoever to support the presence of an incoming group of such numbers as historical and archaeological explanations require.

The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens.

There are people who, independently of the debate about Dumézil, have main­ tained that the scholarly work on the Indo-Europeans is simply a collection of myths. So, for example, the historian Léon Poliakov titled his book on the Indo-European discourse Le Mythe Aryen. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has described the research on Indo-Europeans as “a modern myth,“ and Bruce Lincoln has argued, in a book analyzing the research about Indo- European mythology, that this research has been “mythology with footnotes.“9 The French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant also calls the nineteenth-century scholarship “a web of scientific myths.“ (5)

"Scholars from Sir William Jones to the PRESENT imagined this group (Aryans aka Indo-Europeans) as their most ancient ancestors and created for them an account of origins that, in its many variants, carried biblical, colonialist, racist, Orientalist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and militarist valences at one time or another (Lincoln 1999, pp. 211-212, parenthesis and emphasis added).

Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda , who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization who were destined to subordination because of their dark skins. The Aryan invaders could still be considered the originators of Indian civilization because they wiped out by fire and slaughter whatever was there before.