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

Indo-European: a term borrowed from comparative linguistics and most usually used to designate the blond North-European race (Homo europaeus), but which may provoke confusion since in most of these regions, originally settled by the North-Europeans, race and language have not overlapped for some time due to the bastardization (Bastardierung) of the Northern European speakers of Indo-European languages.

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.

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.

Indo-European is a branch of Indo-Uralic which was radically transformed under the influence of a North Caucasian substratum when its speakers moved from the area north of the Caspian Sea to the area north of the Black Sea (…). As a result, Indo-European developed a minimal vowel system combined with a large consonant inventory including glottalized stops, also grammatical gender and adjectival agreement, an ergative construction which was lost again but has left its traces in the grammatical system (...).

The assumption of an Indo-European protopeople with definite cultural and racial characteristics is untenable. We are chasing a romantic illusion … The idea of an Indo-European protolanguage is not absurd, but it is not necessary, and we can do very well without it … There is … no compelling reason for the assumption of a homogeneous Indo-European protolanguage from which the individual branches of Indo-European des- cended. … [I]t is equally probable that the Indo-European family arose when some originally non-related languages (the ancestors of the later branches) converged and that the Indo-European languages developed from a protolanguage by divergence.

I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. The same applies to Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, and Slavs. When I speak of them I commit myself to no anatomical characteristics. The blue-eyed and fair-haired Scandinavians may have been conquerors or conquered, they may have adopted the language of their darker lords or their subjects, or vice versa. I assert nothing beyond their language, when I call them Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts and Slavs; and in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. This may seem strong language, but in matters of such importance we cannot be too decided in our language. To me, an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar. It is worse than a Babylonian confusion of tongues- it is down-right theft. We have made our own terminology for the classification of language; let ethnologists make their own for the classification of skulls, and hair and blood.

I trust I may be forgiven for not coming to a clear conclusion myself. Until the script is deciphered, the presently available data are not sufficient to resolve the issue in my mind. The Indo-European languages came from somewhere between the Caspian Sea area (and the Balkans) and northwest South Asia. I do not feel impelled to favor any particular area in this vast expanse: all homeland proposals (not least of all South Asian ones) have significant problems, as I have attempted to outline throughout this work. The Indigenous Aryan critique has certainly influenced my own agnosticism.

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)."

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 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)

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.

Over over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture. Using ancient texts, medieval records, philological observations, and archaeological remains they have described a world, a religion, and a people older than the Sumerians, with whom all history is said to have begun. Those who maintained this culture have been called "Indo-Europeans" and "Proto-Indo-Europeans," "Aryans," and "Ancient Aryans," "Japhetites," and "wiros," among many other terms. These people have not left behind any texts, no objects can definitely be tied to them, nor do we know any "Indo-European" by name. In spite of that, scholars have stubbornly tried to reach back to the ancient "Indo-Europeans," with the help of bold historical, linguistic, and archaeological reconstructions, in the hopes of finding the foundation of their own culture and religion there. xi