Over over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture. Using ancient… - Stefan Arvidsson

This hypothesis becomes quite plausible in view of the fact that Jones strove to defend the Bible's position as the true source of humanity’s most ancient history. Knowledge about India had already been used by British and French deists, who had argued that the ancient Indian tradition could compete well with the Bible in terms of the notion of god, philosophical reflection, and reli­ ability of chronology.52 The best-known deist to promote this idea was Voltaire, whose ambition in religious politics was to reduce the Catholic Church's grip on society and to spread a "natural" and "rational" belief in god. Part of this project involved writing a world history that did not exaggerate the contribu­tions of the Jews and Christians to civilization but that instead pointed to the existence of an ethical monotheism outside the Judeo-Christian sphere. The scant knowledge about India that Voltaire had acquired served him well in this connection: by idealizing India and emphasizing its holy sources, the biblical traditions status was lowered. What Voltaire wanted to show was that a belief in god has always existed and that it thrives without the church and priesthood, even without Christianity and Mosaic legends. 33-5

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)

The theory about India as the original home of the Indo-Europeans, and the Indians as a kind of model Aryans, lost supporters during the nineteenth century, and other homelands and other model Aryans took their place instead (Arvidsson 2006, p.52).