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 c… - Stefan Arvidsson

The original population that the Indo-European Greeks had vanquished when they penetrated the south­ ern Balkan peninsula had, according to Curtius. not been a Negroid or Near Eastern population, like in South Asia, but rather a primitive Indo-European population fragment (“arisch-pelasgischen Volker“).505 The Hellenes, “the O c­ cidental Aryans,“ and the great culture they created were therefore the result of an adventurous conquest and at the same time, in contrast to the Indian culture, thoroughly Aryan.52

The debate about Dumézil is still far from resolved. At its core is the question of whether it was only the Nazis who used the historical writing about "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," or, as the Germans say, “Indo-Germans” for political aims. Did Dumézil, and perhaps other researchers who were active during the 1930s and 1940s, do so as well? If that is the case, what does this entail for the postwar scholarship, which has largely followed the guiding principles of Dumézil? On a more general level, the debate is about whether there is something in the nature of research about Indo-Europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse—perhaps something related to the fact that for the past two centuries, the majority of the scholars who have done research on the Indo-Europeans have considered themselves descendants of this mythical race.(3)

Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) is among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline, and even outside the academy. For half a century—from the 1930s up until his death—Dumézil was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Panthéon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Académie Française by Claude Lévi-Strauss as one of the “Forty Immortals.“ The scholarly work that had led Dumézil to this position was based on a wide-ranging hypothesis that all peoples who spoke Indo-European, or, as they were sometimes called even as late as the i960s, "Aryan“ languages had also inherited a common ideology. In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumézil had found traces of this ideology in Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns, and Old Norse saga literature. The ideology was characterized by a special three-part structure that organized distinct cultural fields. This structure above all guided the pantheon and the social order, but also such things as the classification of various kinds of heroic types, punishments, and taxes. At the highest level in this “Indo-European" tripartite structure was the "function“ of the sovereign holders of power—the priests, lawmakers, and kings; below it, that of the warriors; and at the bottom, the function of the people, or producers.