Aryan Race and Languages. The name Aryan (less properly, Arian) has, since about 1845, been used to designate the ethnological division of mankind otherwise called Indo-European or Indo-Germanic. That division consists of two branches, geographically separated, an eastern and a western. The western branch comprehends the inhabitants of Europe, with the exception of the Turks, the Magyars of Hungary, the Basques of the Pyrenees, and the Finns of Lapland; the eastern comprehends the inhabitants of Armenia, of Persia, of Afghanistan, and of Northern Hindustan. The evidence on which a family relation has been established among these nations is that of language. Between Sanskrit (the mother of the modern Hindu dialects of Hindustan), Zend (the language of the ancient Persians), Greek (which is yet the language of Greece), Latin (the language of the Romans, and the mother of the modern Romanic languages—i.e. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian), Celtic (once the language of great part of Europe, now confined to Wales and parts of France, Ireland, and Scotland), Gothic (which may be taken as the ancient type of the Teutonic or Germanic languages—including English—and of the Scandinavian), and Slavonic (spoken in a variety of dialects all over European Russia and a great part of Austria), the researches of philology have within the 19th century established such affinities as can be accounted for only by supposing that the nations who originally spoke them had a common origin. No one of these nations, existing or historical, can claim to be the parent nation of which the others were colonies. The relation among the languages mentioned is that of sisters—daughters of one mother, which perished, as it were, in giving them birth. No monuments of this mother-language have been preserved, nor have we any history or even tradition of the nation that spoke it. That such a people existed and spoke such a tongue is an inference of comparative philology, the process of reasoning being analogous to that followed in the kindred science of geology. The geologist, interpreting the inscriptions written by the finger of Nature herself upon the rock-tablets of the earth's strata, carries us back myriads of ages before man appeared on the scene at all, and enables us to be present, as it were, at creation itself, and see one formation laid above another, and one plant or animal succeed another. Now languages are to the ethnologist what strata are in geology; dead languages have been well called its fossils and petrifications. By skilful interpretation of their indications, aided by the light of all other avail- able monuments, he is able to spell out, with more or less probability, the ethnical records of the past, and thus obtain a glimpse here and there into the gray cloud that rests over the dawn of the ages.
When these linguistic monuments are consulted as to the primitive seat of the Aryan nations, they point to Central Asia, somewhere probably east of the Caspian, and north of the Hindu Kush and Paropamisan Mountains. There, at a period long anterior to all European history—while Europe was perhaps only a jungle, or, if inhabited at all, inhabited by tribes akin to the Finns, or perhaps to the American Indians—dwelt that mother-nation of which we have spoken. From this centre, in obedience to a law of movement which has continued to act through all history, successive migrations took place towards the north-west. The first swarm formed the Celts, who seem at one time to have occupied a great part of Europe; at a considerably later epoch came the ancestors of the Italians, the Greeks, and the Teutonic peoples. All these would seem to have made their way to their new settlements through Persia and Asia Minor, crossing into Europe by the Hellespont, and partly, perhaps, between the Caspian and the Black Sea. The stream that formed the Slavonic nations is thought to have taken the route by the north of the Caspian. At a period subsequent to the last north-western migration, the remnant of the primitive stock would seem to have broken up; part poured southwards through the passes of the Himalaya and Hindu Kush into the Punjab, and became the dominant race in the valley of the Ganges; while the rest settled in Persia, and became the Medes and Persians of history.
It is from these eastern members that the whole family takes its name. In the most ancient Sanskrit writings (the Veda), the Hindus style themselves Aryas; and the name may be preserved in the classic Arian, a tribe of ancient Persia, and in the district Ariana. Ariyana is evidently an old Persian word, preserved in the modern native name of Persia, Airan or Iran. Arya, in Sanskrit, signifies 'excellent,' 'honourable,' originally, 'lord of the soil,' from a root ar (Lat. arare, 'to plough'), distinguishing tillers (earers) of the earth from the nomadic Turanians. French savans limit the word Aryan to the eastern section of the Indo-European stock.
Max Müller has drawn a picture of the Aryan family while yet one and undivided, in which the state of thought, language, religion, and civilisation is exhibited in a multitude of details. Where the same name for an object or notion is found used by the widely spread members of the family, it is justly inferred that that object or notion must have been familiar to them while yet resident together in the paternal home. It is in this way established, that among the primitive Aryans not only were the natural and primary family relations of father, mother, son, daughter, hallowed, but even the more conventional affinities of father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law; that to the organised family life there was superadded a state organisation with rulers or kings; that the ox and the cow constituted the chief riches and means of subsistence; and that houses and towns were built.
One general observation made by Max Müller is so interesting that we quote it entire. 'It should be observed,' he says, 'that most of the terms connected with chase and warfare differ in each of the Aryan dialects, while words connected with more peaceful occupations belong generally to the common heirloom of the Aryan language. The proper appreciation of this fact in its general bearing will show how a similar remark made by Niebuhr, with regard to Greek and Latin, requires a very different explanation from that which that great scholar, from his more restricted point of view, was able to give it. It will show that all the Aryan nations had led a long life of peace before they separated, and that their language acquired individuality and nationality as each colony started in search of new homes—new generations forming new terms connected with the warlike and adventurous life of their onward migrations. Hence it is that not only Greek and Latin, but all Aryan languages, have their peaceful words in common; and hence it is that they all differ so strangely in their warlike expressions. Thus the domestic animals are generally known by the same name in England and in India, while the wild beasts have different names, even in Greek and Latin.'
In this mainly pastoral life, the more important of the primitive arts were known and exercised: fields were tilled; grain was raised and ground into meal; food was cooked and baked; cloth was woven and sewed into garments; and the use of the metals, even of iron, was known. The numbers as far as a hundred had been named, the decimal principle being followed. The name for a thousand had not come into requisition until after the dispersion, for it differs in the different Aryan tongues.
The Aryan religion consisted in a worship of natural objects and phenomena, more especially of the sun and dawn, and other bright powers of day; but it was henotheistic rather than polytheistic, as out of the many gods he believed in, the worshipper prayed to one only at a time. The gods ruled the world, dwelling like a human family with the dyauspitar (Diespiter) at their head. This 'father of heaven' was the 'bright' sun, the stars and moon were his sons and daughters. Fragments of the hymns addressed to the gods, framed while abstract language did not yet exist, and every word was a metaphor, originated those stories of gods, heroes, and monsters, which, with more or less of variety, but still with a family likeness, formed the primitive mythology of every member of the group. Curious parallels, however, between Aryan mythology and that of savage races not ethnologically connected with the Aryan have been pointed out by Lang and others, and have given rise to discussion whether these are due to transmission, or to the essential identity in the working of the human mind at equal levels of culture.
The theory of the European origin of the Aryans, advanced by Omalius d'Halloy in 1339-44, and by Latham (q.v.) in 1862, was supported by Spiegel and Benfey, and finds increasing adhesion. See Poesche, Die Arier (1878); Penka, Herkunft der Arier (1886); Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryans (trans. by Jevons, 1890); and Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans (1889). Some European languages would then be truer representatives of the old Aryan tongue than the Indic ones. The original home of the Aryans would be Scandinavia, or the neighbourhood of the Baltic; and the Aryan himself, a coarse nomad, without metals, clothed in skins. Poesche assumes that the Aryan languages were the product of the white race, whose colour was due to the albinoism caused by a long residence in the marshy country between the Niemen and the Dnieper. But as Sayce points out, the weight of evidence from comparative philology is against other than an Asiatic cradle for the Aryan tongue. The parent-speech need not necessarily have been one undivided uniform tongue, but may already have been split up into dialects, like the provincial Latin that developed into the Romanic languages of modern Europe. Humboldt believed that the Sea of Aral is the remains of a great inland lake which once included the Caspian and the Euxine—a theory confirmed by recent researches. According to Sayce, it was this inland sea, with the desert that lay to the south of it, which cut the Aryans off from communication with the civilised races of Elam and Babylonia, and forced the first emigrants to the west to push their way through the steppes of Tartary and the pass of the Ural range.
See Sayce's Introduction to the Science of Language (2d ed. 2 vols. 1883); also the articles ETHNOLOGY, PHILOLOGY, MYTHOLOGY.