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Not so fun fact: Mythicism around Proto-Indo-European is part of what made Hitler come up with the idea of "Aryans" because they hypothesized that there was som

Not so fun fact: Mythicism around Proto-Indo-European is part of what made Hitler come up with the idea of "Aryans" because they hypothesized that there was some relation between the language having come from Iran (as "Urheimat") and then this leads to everyone wanting to be (indo)-aryan-decendent the most.

JuniperMesos 1mo ago
Hitler didn't personally come up with the idea of Aryans, in the sense of a historic ethno-linguistic group in Eurasia speaking a Indo-European language; that comes out of the scholarship of Indo-European prehistory. Which isn't to say that every 19th or 20th century scholar doing this kind of speculation was equally careful or free of ideological bias; but it's also a mistake to say that the idea of a pre-historic Aryan people is fake simply because the Nazis applied that label in a mythologized sense to gentile Germanic peoples. Our current best understanding of the archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence (and the genetic evidence in particular became available only in the past 20 years or so), suggests that the archeological culture we label the Sintashta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintashta_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintashta_culture), who flourished on the central Asian steppes c. 2000 BC, almost certainly spoke the language we reconstruct as Proto-Indo-Iranian (that is, the descendant of Proto-Indo-European ancestral to the modern Indian and Persian languages), likely used the term "Arya" as some kind of self-designation - and when their ethno-linguistic descents showed up on the Indian subcontinent in the mid-2nd-millennium BC, this probably mostly felt like a violent invasion from the perspective of the non-Indo-European-speaking peoples already inhabiting the region. In other words, pretty much every modern Indian or Iranian person is in fact a descendant of an ancient people we can reasonably call the Aryans even if "Sintashta culture" is a more precise archaeological term; and this is the case regardless of what Adolf Hitler thought about how this applied to ethnic Germans in his day.
- thaumasiotes 1mo ago
  Note that in the 16th century BC we can already see Indic (not Indo-Iranian, but specifically Indic) speakers ruling territory in Syria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni

JuniperMesos 1mo ago

Hitler didn't personally come up with the idea of Aryans, in the sense of a historic ethno-linguistic group in Eurasia speaking a Indo-European language; that comes out of the scholarship of Indo-European prehistory. Which isn't to say that every 19th or 20th century scholar doing this kind of speculation was equally careful or free of ideological bias; but it's also a mistake to say that the idea of a pre-historic Aryan people is fake simply because the Nazis applied that label in a mythologized sense to gentile Germanic peoples. Our current best understanding of the archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence (and the genetic evidence in particular became available only in the past 20 years or so), suggests that the archeological culture we label the Sintashta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintashta_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintashta_culture), who flourished on the central Asian steppes c. 2000 BC, almost certainly spoke the language we reconstruct as Proto-Indo-Iranian (that is, the descendant of Proto-Indo-European ancestral to the modern Indian and Persian languages), likely used the term "Arya" as some kind of self-designation - and when their ethno-linguistic descents showed up on the Indian subcontinent in the mid-2nd-millennium BC, this probably mostly felt like a violent invasion from the perspective of the non-Indo-European-speaking peoples already inhabiting the region. In other words, pretty much every modern Indian or Iranian person is in fact a descendant of an ancient people we can reasonably call the Aryans even if "Sintashta culture" is a more precise archaeological term; and this is the case regardless of what Adolf Hitler thought about how this applied to ethnic Germans in his day.

thaumasiotes 1mo ago
Note that in the 16th century BC we can already see Indic (not Indo-Iranian, but specifically Indic) speakers ruling territory in Syria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni