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 t… - Vere Gordon Childe

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 of any medieval town. . . . Judging by the domestic architecture, the seal-cutting, and the grace of the pottery, the Indus civilization was ahead of the Babylonian at the beginning of the third millennium (ca. 3000 B.C.). But that was a late phase of the Indian culture; it may have enjoyed no less lead in earlier times. Were then the innovations and discoveries that characterize proto-Sumerian civilization not native developments on Babylonian soil, but the results of Indian inspiration? If so, had the Sumerians themselves come from the Indus, or at least from regions in its immediate sphere of influence?”

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)

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)