In the 1970s, the Mankind Quarterly, which alternates articles about race and genetics with articles about the Indo-Europeans and prehistoric culture… - Stefan Arvidsson

According to Renfrew, there are many pitfalls in the attempt to create an “inventory’’ of Proto-Indo-European words. For example, it can be very difficult to determine whether a word truly is inherited from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary or has been borrowed later from an Indo-European sib­ling language. If this question cannot be resolved, it is impossible to determine whether the object or phenomenon that the word denoted existed in the Proto-Indo-European homeland or is something that people became acquainted with later. And how can we know, Renfrew continues his critical review, that the semantic meaning of a word has been constant over the centuries? Without knowing that, one cannot use the word in question to create a picture of, say, the fauna that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were familiar with.

It is easy-as is evident from a critical reading of, for example. the foremost work about the Aryan discourse, Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth-to interpret all praise of the Aryan mentality as an expression of the naturalistic critique of the Semites, that is to say, as true anti-Semitism. But during the nineteenth century, especially, and even into the twentieth century, there did exist an Aryanist tradition that had very little in common with the naturalistic tradition and its Nazi anticlimax. This Aryanism had liberal and universalist overtones, and interpreted. the Semitic tradition as the incarnation of conservatism and antiquated. pluralistic chauvinism. Scholars such as Renan and Müller would probably have criticized. Nazism in the same way that they criticized traditionalistic Semitic religions: it stands in the way of the realization of universal humanity. From this perspective, the Aryan becomes the same as the consummate human being. 317

In other words, Müller presented the European cradle as self-m ade . The ideological victory was a given: if Hellas was to function as the example for a culturally high-standing German nation-state, it was essen­ tial that the model not have been constituted by foreign cultures. Influences from neighboring peoples that could not be denied (especially the alphabet) were explained by the claim that the Greeks, on their own, had imported the item in question. With the Greek war of independence (1821-29), where the Greeks fought the Ottoman Empire, Müller’s isolation of the Hellenes from the surrounding peoples became timely, and for the bourgeoisie, with their classical schooling, it seemed increasingly absurd that Greece and the West ever could have received anything valuable from the Orient. 51