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 particu… - Vere Gordon Childe
" "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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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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V. Gordon Childe
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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)
But as a whole they [Kassites] were not Aryans. Though they adopted the Babylonian language and culture, the local scribes have recorded the Kassite names for god, star, heaven, wind, man, foot, etc. ; not one of these is in the least Indo-European. Moreover, the majority of the personal names of the period ... suggest rather a kinship between the Kassites and the Asianic folk to the north-west. Yet in the names of their kings occur elements recalling Indo-Iranian deities — SuriaS (Sun-god cf . Sans. Surya) IndaS (cf. Sans. Indra)y MaruttaS (cf. Sans. Mantiah, storm-gods) and -bugaS (cf. Iran, baga, god). Moreover, these Kassites introduced the use of the horse for drawing chariots into the Ancient East and its later Babylonian name sitsu seems to be derived from the Indo- Iranian form ^asm (Sans. aim). It is then highly probable that the Kassite invasion was due to the pressure of Aryan tribes on the highlands of Iran, and that its leaders were actually Aryan princes.
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No multiplication of weapons of war and battle‐scenes attests futile conflicts between city‐ states as in Babylonia nor yet the force whereby a single king, as in Egypt, achieved by conquest internal peace and warded off jealous nomads by constant preparedness … The visitor inevitably gets an impression of a democratic bourgeois economy, as in Crete, in contrast to the obviously centralized theocracies and monarchies hitherto described. (Childe, quoted in Wheeler, 1955: 191)
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