Hello, welcome to the General History channel, and in this week's video we will see about a linguistic group from the central Asian steppes that has influenced the world from ancient times to the present day. This group is known as the Aryans! !
This linguistic group was a very controversial topic in the 19th and 20th centuries, regarding its origin and importance. And in this video we will learn more about these origins, and who the true Aryans are. But before this trip back in time, I would like to ask you to leave a thumbs up on the video, subscribe to the channel and share it with more people, this will help the channel a lot and it won't cost you anything.
This way, more people will have access to this content and more videos that will be released every week. . Initial Migration and Origin of the name The word Aryan is a Sanskrit designation that means “civilized”, “noble”, but without reference to any ethnicity .
It was first applied as a term of self-identification by a migratory group of people from Central Asia, later known as Indo-Iranians who settled on the Iranian plateau, and later applied to Indo-Aryans who traveled south to settle. settle in northern India) It is believed that the migratory group of these people referred to as Indo-Iranians and Indo-Aryans originally came from the area of present-day Kazakhstan near the Ural River and moved gradually towards the Iranian plateau and the Valley of Going sometime before the 3rd millennium BCE. This word “Aryan” does not refer to a specific people, with a specific ethnicity.
There was, therefore, no widespread ethnic connotation before the 19th century BCE, other than its use by Persians who called themselves “Iranians” or “Aryans” to distinguish themselves from their Muslim Arab conquerors in the 7th century BCE, and even then, It could be argued, that it was not so much an ethnic distinction as a class and personality distinction. Before the Arab conquest, Persia had been “the land of the Aryans. ” A Word Used for Evil The name “Aryan” became associated with ethnicity, and especially with light-skinned or Caucasian superiority, only after Western European scholars began translating, and often misinterpreting, Sanskrit texts into the 18th century and more extensively in the 19th century CE.
In the 18th century, theories arose about a correlation between the Sanskrit language and European languages , and this concept was popularized by the philologist Sir William Jones (1746-1794 CE) in 1786 CE, who claimed that there was a common source for these languages that he called Proto-Indo-European. Jones's statement inspired later writers to identify this “common source” and encouraged the French elitist Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882 CE) to develop the racist theories of “Aryan Blood” and White Supremacy, which eventually became popular in Europe. Germany through the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927 CE), the British political philosopher who would become the mentor and inspiration of Adolf Hitler, who would shape and enforce Nazi ideology and all the tragedy that followed.
The work of Gobineau, Chamberlain and the claim of the Aryan invasion would be embraced by the British throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to justify their control of India, as it was the “Aryans” – a superior race – who were bringing culture and civilization to the least. fortunate. And these tragedies that followed only demonstrated that when science is biased and applied for non-scientific purposes, or to guide a specific agenda, a simple word can cause a lot of harm.
Nowadays, it is preferred to use the term “Caucasian” to identify a certain group of light-skinned individuals instead of Aryan, due to this negative charge that was wrongly imposed on them. The early Iranian language is called Avestan, a language very similar to Vedic Sanskrit and in which the Zoroastrian scriptures called the Avesta were written, and this book is the oldest source for the origin and meaning of the term Aryan. According to these texts, everything worth hearing and remembering is referred to as arya; he who hears, remembers and acts in accordance with these worthy precepts is an Aryan.
Migration and the Indus Valley Civilization At some point, the so-called Indo-Aryans of the original migratory group went south in towards India, where they are believed to have merged with the native peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappan Civilization or Harappan Culture (c. 7000—c. 600 BCE).
This civilization was highly advanced, as evidenced by Neolithic sites, such as Mergar, occupied for 9 thousand years, whose population developed agricultural and architectural techniques, religious rituals, domestication of plants and animals and produced impressive artistic works. However, sometime between c. 1900—1500 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization began to decline.
Cities were abandoned and there was a significant migration of people to the south of the Indian subcontinent. This period of migration and change coincides with the development of Vedic thought and the so-called Vedic Period (c. 1500—500 BCE), when the Vedas, the sacred texts of Hinduism, were written in Sanskrit.
Since the people of the Indus Valley Civilization did not write in Sanskrit, this language – and the concepts it expressed in the scriptures – had to have come from elsewhere. It is thought that they arrived with an Indo-Aryan migration, perhaps many and over several years, and the cultures and languages of these groups mixed. The southward migration of Indus Valley inhabitants is well established, but there is no need to assume that some invading military force drove the relocation.
And much less, for lack of evidence, that the Aryans would have been such possible conquerors. The Indo-Aryans settled in Bactria, southeast of present-day Uzbekistan and north of Afghanistan, leaving their mark in the so-called “Oxo Civilization” of the Bronze Age, dating from 2200 to 1700 BCE. From here, their association with Vedic culture would have begun.
In Ancient India, the term Aryavarta, meaning “residence of the Aryans”, was used to refer to the north of the subcontinent where these people lived. The Vedic language later evolved into Sanskrit, which gave rise to all the Indo-European languages spoken in India. It is worth remembering that the Drvidian languages of southern India are not considered part of this Indo-European linguistic family.
Migration to the Iranian Plateau From the territory of Bactria, other Indo-Aryans migrated to the Middle East. There is evidence of the existence of Indo-Aryan speakers in Mesopotamia around 1500 BCE, through words present in the Mitanite dialect, in the region occupied by the Hurrians. It is speculated that these people may have been led by an Indo-Aryan ruling class, forming the Kingdom of Mitanni.
Archaeological studies have uncovered a large number of Vedic proper names and, in particular, names of deities. The term Aryan, understood as being a subgroup of Indo-Iranian peoples, refers to a series of groups, such as the Persians, the Parthians, the Medes, the Alans, among other peoples, who came to form different cultures and kingdoms. established on the Iranian plateau.
All of these peoples coexisted on the Iranian plateau, but only in the 8th century BCE did one of them, the Medes, establish a small empire in the region, which later, together with the Persians, would have much prominence. The Persians, who dominated following the Medes, used the term Aryan in a racial and ethnic sense to describe their lineage and language. Darius the Great (521-486 BCE), king of the Achaemenid Empire, recorded in a proclamation inscribed at Naqsh-e Rustam, in present-day Iran: “I am Darius, the Great King.
. . A Persian, the son of a Persian, a Aryan of Aryan lineage.
. . ” The document also refers to the “Aryan language,” which would correspond to what we today call ancient Persian.
This tradition has persisted to this day among most Iranian people, which is a name derived from Aryan. In Zoroastrianism, the word “Aryan” was adopted, however, as a religious concept, although it has always maintained its ethnic meaning among Iranians. In 1967, the Pahlavi dynasty added the word Āryāmehr “Light of the Aryans” to its titles until it was dethroned in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution.
Even today, Armenians call themselves Aryaee, or Aryans. The Legacy The Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian peoples are made up of a vast diversity of ethnicities that share among themselves the "Indic" branch of the Indo-Iranian languages and there are currently around a billion speakers of these languages, the majority of which originate from southern Asia, and found in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, in Afghanistan and in areas as far west as present-day Syria or Iraq, where the Mitanni Empire was located, and as far east as present-day Cambodia and Vietnam, places where the Khmer Hindu and Champa kingdoms were established. It is important to remember that although there is no ethnic unity, the people who recognized themselves as Aryans initially carried with them the importance of seeking a moral elevation, of nobility, which sets them apart from other peoples, not to impose a belief or sovereignty, inferiorizing others who were different, something totally different from what was attributed to them, in recent times, soiling the honor, or Arya, of the Aryan people.
All because of baseless and power-greedy ideologies and beliefs. I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane and that I added something positive to you. If you've made it this far, I ask you to leave a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel and share it with more people.
Thank you very much and until the next story. . .
