By the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison with that of Periclean Athens or … - Vere Gordon Childe

Not only are they (the theories of racial anthropology] worthless; they are mischievous. They have induced their votaries to postulate all sorts of migrations, for which there are as yet not a particle of evidence. To but­ tress the Nordic s claim to be the ruling race p a r excellence, attempts have been made, and are still being made, to prove that the earliest dynasties of China, Sumer, and Egypt were established by invaders from Europe and even today the vision of certain prehistorians is absolutely distorted by this preconception. Such misdirected enthusiasm also injures science in another way. The apotheosis of the Nordics has been linked to the policies of imperialism and world domination: the word "Aryan” has become the watchword of dangerous factions and especially of the more brutal and blatant forms of anti-Semitism. Indeed the neglect and discredit into which the study of Indo-European philology has fallen in England are very largely attributable to a legitimate reaction against the extravagancies of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his ilk, and the gravest objection to the word Aryan is its association with pogroms.(287)

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.

[l]anguage, albeit an abstraction, is yet a more subtle and pervasive criterion of individuality than the culture-group formed by comparing flints and potsherds or the “races” of the skull-measurer. . . . they [the Aryans] must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by their community of speech. To their linguistic heirs they bequeathed, if not skull types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and precious, spiritual identity. . . . The Indo-European languages and their presumed parent-speech have been throughout exceptionally delicate and flexible instruments of thought. They were almost unique, for instance, in possessing a substantive verb and at least a rudimentary machinery for building subordinate clauses that might express conceptual relations in a chain of ratiocination. It follows then that the Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture. (p. 4)