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Aryan (), or Arya (borrowed from Sanskrit ārya),Oxford English Dictionary Online 2024, s.v. Aryan (adj. & n.); Arya (n.) . is a term originating from the ethno-cultural self-designation of the Indo-Iranians.: "At the outset, it has to be underlined that the term Ārya (whence, Aryan) is the self-designation of the ancient Iranians and of those Indian groups speaking Vedic Sanskrit and other Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) languages and dialects. Both peoples called themselves and their language ārya or arya: ..." It stood in contrast to nearby outsiders, whom they designated as Aneran (an-āryā). In ancient India, the term was used by the Indo-Aryan peoples of the Vedic period, both as an endonym and in reference to a region called Aryavarta (, ), where their culture emerged. Similarly, according to the Avesta, the Iranian peoples used the term to designate themselves as an ethnic group and to refer to a region called Airyanem Vaejah (, ), which was their mythical homeland. The word stem also forms the etymological source of place names like Alania (Aryāna) and Iran (Aryānām).
Although the stem arya may originate from the Proto-Indo-European language, it seems to have been used exclusively by the Indo-Iranian peoples, as there is no evidence of it having served as an ethnonym for the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The view of many modern scholars is that the ethos of the ancient Aryan identity, as it is described in the Avesta and the Rigveda, was religious, cultural, and linguistic, and was not tied to the concept of race.
In the 1850s, the French diplomat and writer Arthur de Gobineau brought forth the idea of the "Aryan race", essentially claiming that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were superior specimens of humans and that their descendants comprised either a distinct racial group or a distinct sub-group of the hypothetical Caucasian race. Through the work of his later followers, such as the British-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau's theory proved to be particularly popular among European racial supremacists and ultimately laid the foundation for Nazi racial theories, which also co-opted the concept of scientific racism.
In Nazi Germany, and also in German-occupied Europe during World War II, any citizen who was classified as an Aryan would be honoured as a member of the "master race" of humanity. Conversely, non-Aryans were legally discriminated against, including Jews, Romani people, and Slavs (mostly Polish people and Russians). Jews, who were regarded as the arch enemy of the "Aryan race" in a "racial struggle for existence", were especially targeted by the Nazi Party, culminating in the Holocaust. The Roma, who are of Indo-Aryan origin, were also targeted, culminating in the Porajmos. The genocides and other large-scale atrocities that have been committed by Aryanism have led academic figures to generally avoid using "Aryan" as a stand-alone ethno-linguistic term, particularly in the Western world, where "Indo-Iranian" is the preferred alternative, although the term "Indo-Aryan" is still used to denote the Indic branch.
The Sanskrit word ā́rya is rendered as 'noble' in William Jones' 1794 translation of the Indian Laws of Manu. The English Aryan (originally spelt Arian) appeared a few decades later, first as an adjective in 1839, then as a noun in 1849, probably after the German Arier (noun), arisch (adjective). During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the meaning varied between the broader category equivalent to Indo-European, and the narrower one equivalent to Indo-Iranian.
Use of Aryan to designate a "white non-Jewish person, especially one of northern European origin or descent" entered the English language from German, after this meaning was introduced in 1887 and further developed by German anti-Semitic propagandists in the context of a so-called "Aryan race". It is still used in far-right and white supremacist discourse, and sometimes appears in the names of such groups.
These two terms derive from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-Iranian stem arya- or āryo-,; ; ; which was probably the name used by the prehistoric Indo-Iranians to designate themselves as an ethnocultural group. The term did not have any racial connotation, which only emerged later in the works of 19th-century Western writers. According to David W. Anthony, "the Rigveda and Avesta agreed that the essence of their shared parental Indo-Iranian identity was linguistic and ritual, not racial. If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan."
The term "Aryan" is a word from the Old Persian or the Avestan, which is the same in the root with Sanskrit.
The term h₂er(y)ós may derive from the PIE verbal root h₂er-, meaning 'to put together'. Oswald Szemerényi has also argued that the stem could be a Near-Eastern loanword from the Ugaritic ary ('kinsmen'), although J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams find this proposition "hardly compelling". According to them, the original PIE meaning had a clear emphasis on the in-group status of the "freemen" as distinguished from that of outsiders, particularly those captured and incorporated into the group as slaves. In Anatolia, the base word has come to emphasize personal relationship, whereas it took a more ethnic meaning among Indo-Iranians, presumably because most of the unfree (anarya) who lived among them were captives from other ethnic groups.
The stem is also found in the Indo-Iranian god Aryaman, translated as 'Arya-spirited,' 'Aryanness,' or 'Aryanhood;' he was known in Vedic Sanskrit as Aryaman and in Avestan as Airyaman. The deity was in charge of welfare and the community, and connected with the institution of marriage. Through marital ceremonies, one of the functions of Aryaman was to assimilate women from other tribes to the host community. If the Irish heroes Érimón and Eochu Airem and the Gaulish personal name Ariomanus are also (i.e. linguistic siblings sharing a common origin), a deity of Proto-Indo-European origin named h₂eryo-men may also be posited.
The 'non-Aryas' designated primarily those who were not able to speak the āryā language correctly, the Mleccha or Mṛdhravāc. However, āryā is used only once in the Vedas to designate the language of the texts, the Vedic area being defined in the Aranyaka as that where the āryā vāc ('Ārya speech') is spoken. Some 35 names of Vedic tribes, chiefs and poets mentioned in the Rigveda were of 'non-Aryan' origin, demonstrating that cultural assimilation to the ā́rya community was possible, and/or that some 'Aryan' families chose to give 'non-Aryan' names to their newborns. In the words of Indologist Michael Witzel, the term ārya "does not mean a particular people or even a particular 'racial' group but all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms (such as ritual, poetry, etc.)".
In later Indian texts and Buddhist sources, ā́rya took the meaning of 'noble', such as in the terms Āryadésa- ('noble land') for India, Ārya-bhāṣā- ('noble language') for Sanskrit, or āryaka- ('honoured man'), which gave the Pali ayyaka- ('grandfather'). The term came to incorporate the idea of a high social status, but was also used as an honorific for the or the Buddhist monks. Parallelly, the Mleccha acquired additional meanings that referred to people of lower castes or aliens.
The people of the Avesta, exclusively used the term airya (, ) to refer to themselves. It can be found in a number geographical terms like the 'Airyanem Vaejah' (airiianəm vaēǰō), the 'dwelling place of the airyas' (airiio.shaiianem), or the 'white forest of the airyas' (vīspe.aire.razuraya). The term can also be found in poetic expressions such as the 'Khvarenah' (airiianąm xᵛarənō), the 'most swift-arrowed of the airyas' (xšviwi išvatəmō airiianąm), or the 'Kay Khosrow' (arša airiianąm). Although the Avesta does not contain any dateable events, modern scholarship assumes that the Avestan period mostly predates the Achaemenid period of Iranian history.
By the late 6th–early 5th century BCE, the Achaemenid king Darius the Great and his son Xerxes I described themselves as ariya ('Arya') and ariya čiça ('of Aryan origin'). In the Behistun inscription, authored by Darius during his reign (522 – 486 BCE), the Old Persian language is called ariya, and the Elamite language version of the inscription portrays the Zoroastrianism deity Ahura Mazda as the "god of the Aryas" ( ura-masda naap harriia-naum).
The self-identifier was inherited in ethnic names such as the Parthian Ary (pl. Aryān), the Middle Persian Ēr (pl. Ēran), or the New Persian Irāni (pl. Irāniyān). The Scythian branch has Alans or Allān (from Aryāna; modern Allon), Rhoxolani ('Bright Alans'), Alanorsoi ('White Alans'), and possibly the modern Ossetian Ir (adj. Iron people), spelled Irä or Erä in the Digorian dialect. The Rabatak inscription, written in the Bactrian language in the 2nd century CE, likewise uses the term ariao for 'Iranian'.
The name Arizantoi, listed by Greek historian Herodotus as one of the six tribes composing the Iranian Medes, is derived from the Old Iranian arya-zantu- ('having Aryan lineage'). Herodotus also mentions that the Medes once called themselves Arioi, and Strabo locates the land of Arianē between Persia and India. Other occurrences include the Greek áreion (Damascius), Arianoi (Diodorus Siculus) and arian (pl. arianōn; Sasanian period), as well as the Armenian expression ari (Agathangelos), meaning 'Iranian'.
Until the demise of the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE), the Iranian identity was essentially defined as cultural and religious. Following conflicts between Manichaeism universalism and Zoroastrianism nationalism during the 3rd century CE, however, traditionalistic and nationalistic movements eventually took the upper hand during the Sasanian Empire, and the Iranian identity ( ērīh) came to assume a definite political value. Among Iranians ( ērān), one ethnic group in particular, the Persians, were placed at the centre of the Ērān-šahr ('Kingdom of the Iranians') ruled by the šāhān-šāh ērān ud anērān ('King of Kings of the Iranians and non-Iranians').
Ethical and ethnic meanings may also intertwine, for instance in the use of anēr ('non-Iranian') as a synonymous of 'evil' in anērīh ī hrōmāyīkān ("the evil conduct of the Romans, i.e. Byzantines"), or in the association of ēr ('Iranian') with good birth ( hutōhmaktom ēr martōm, 'the best-born Arya man') and the use of ērīh ('Iranianness') to mean 'nobility' against "labor and burdens from poverty" in the 10th-century Dēnkard. The Indian opposition between ārya- ('noble') and dāsá- ('stranger, slave, enemy') is however absent from the Iranian tradition. According to linguist Émile Benveniste, the root das- may have been used exclusively as a collective name by Iranian peoples: "If the word referred at first to Iranian society, the name by which this enemy people called themselves collectively took on a hostile connotation and became for the Aryas of India the term for an inferior and barbarous people."
Old Persian names derived the stem arya- include Aryabignes (arya-bigna, 'Gift of the Aryans'), Ariarathes (Arya-wratha-, 'having Aryan joy'), Ariobarzanēs (Ārya-bṛzāna-, 'exalting the Aryans'), Ariaeus (arya-ai-, probably used as a hypocorism of the precedent names), or Ariaramnes (whose meaning remains unclear)., , , , The English Alan and the French Alain (from Latin Alanus) may have been introduced by Alan settlers to Western Europe during the first millennium CE.
The stem airya- also appears in Airyanem Vaejah (the 'stretch of the Aryas' or the 'Aryan plain'), which is described in the Avesta as the mythical homeland of the early Iranians, said to have been created as "the first and best of places and habitations" by the god Ahura Mazdā. It was referred to in Manichean Sogdian as ʾryʾn wyžn ( Aryān Wēžan), and in Old Persian as Aryānām Waiǰah, which gave the Middle Persian Ērān-wēž, said to be the region where the first cattle were created and where Zaratustra first revealed the Good Religion. The Sasanian Empire, officially named Ērān-šahr ('Kingdom of the Iranians'; from Old Persian Aryānām Xšaθram), could also be referred to by the abbreviated form Ērān, as distinguished from the Roman West known as Anērān. The western variant Īrān, abbreviated from Īrān-šahr, is at the origin of the English country name Iran.
Alania, the name of the medieval kingdom of the Alans, derives from a dialectal variant of the Old Iranian stem Aryāna-, which is also linked to the mythical Airyanem Vaejah. Besides the ala- development, air-y- may have turned into the stem ir-y- via an i-mutation in modern Ossetian languages, as in the place name Iryston (Ossetia), here attached to the Iranian suffix -stan]].
Other place names mentioned in the Avesta include airyō šayana, a movable term corresponding to the 'territory of the Aryas', airyanąm dahyunąm, the 'lands of the Aryas', Airyō-xšuθa, a mountain in eastern Iran associated with Ǝrəxša, and vīspe aire razuraya, the forest where Kavi Haosravō slew the god Vāyu.
In Pahlavi Iran (1925–1979), nationalism was used to popularize the Aryan myth and promote Iranian antiquity, bolstering both national identity and the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty. This "Aryan and Neo-Achaemenid nationalism" emerged prominently in the 1930s and remained influential throughout the Pahlavi period. In 1935, Reza Shah mandated that the country be known internationally as 'Iran' (a name linked to the term 'Aryan') rather than 'Persia', which was seen as a European label derived from the southern province of Fars province. His son, Mohammad Reza, later adopted the title "King of the Kings, Light of the Aryans" (Aryamehr), and in the 1970s, he even proposed an 'Aryan brotherhood' among Iran, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as a means to foster regional peace and celebrate a shared legacy of a distinguished civilization.
The word ārya is also often used in Jainism, in Jain texts such as the Pannavanasutta. In Avaśyakaniryukti, an early Jaina text, a character named Ārya Mangu is mentioned twice.
During the 19th century, through the works of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Christian Lassen (1800–1876), Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875), and Max Müller (1823–1900), the terms Aryans, Arier, and Aryens came to be adopted by a number of Western scholars as a synonym of '(Proto-)Indo-Europeans'. Many of them indeed believed that Aryan was also the original self-designation used by the prehistoric speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, based on the erroneous assumptions that Sanskrit was the oldest Indo-European language and on the linguistically untenable position that Ériu (Ireland) was related to Arya. This hypothesis has since been abandoned in scholarship due to the lack of evidence for the use of arya as an ethnocultural self-designation outside the Indo-Iranian world.
However, the atrocities committed in the name of Aryanism racial ideologies during the first part of the 20th century have led academics to generally avoid the term 'Aryan', which has been replaced in most cases by 'Indo-Iranian', although its Indic branch is still called 'Indo-Aryan'. The name 'Iranian', which stems from the Old Persian Aryānām, also continues to be used to refer to specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Karl Penka, credited as "a transitional figure between Aryanism and Nordicism", argued in 1868 that the Aryans originated in southern Scandinavia.: "An Aryan homeland in the unhealthy environment of a swamp was hardly conducive to the development of the 'powerful, energetic blond race' or so Karl Penka argued in 1868. Rather, Penka pressed into service all the disciplines he could - archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and mythology - to demonstrate that the Aryans originated in Southern Scandinavia." In 1878, German Americans anthropologist Theodor Poesche proposed to located the original Aryans in Lithuania. In the early-20th century, German scholar Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), attempting to connect a prehistoric material culture with the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, contended on archaeological grounds that the 'Indo-Germanic' ( Indogermanische) migrations originated from a homeland located in northern Europe. Until the end of World War II, scholarship on the Indo-European Urheimat broadly fell into two camps: Kossinna's followers and those, initially led by Otto Schrader (1855–1919), who supported a steppe homeland in Eurasia, which became the most widespread hypothesis among scholars.
The first recorded instance of the German Arier to mean 'non-Jewish' appears to have been in 1887, when a Viennese fitness society decided to admit only "Germans of Aryan descent" ( Deutsche arischer Abkunft) as members. In The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), which Stefan Arvidsson notes is identified as "one of the most important proto-Nazi texts", British-German writer Houston Chamberlain theorized an existential struggle to the death between a superior German-Aryan race and a destructive Jewish-Semitic race, influenced by Renan's antagonistic divide between Aryans and Semites. Chamberlain's work was highly influential, leading German Emperor Wilhelm II to mandate that his book be required reading for school teachers in training. The best-seller The Passing of the Great Race, published by American writer Madison Grant in 1916, warned of a danger of miscegenation with the immigrant 'inferior races' – including speakers of Indo-European languages (such as Slavs, Italians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews) – allegedly faced by the 'racially superior' Germanic Aryans (that is: Americans of English, German Americans, and Scandinavian descent).
Race mysticists like Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) and Julius Langbehn (1851–1907) regarded Aryans as nature-bound, unspoilt Germanics ( Urgermanen), detached from modern materialism and liberalism. Led by Guido von List (1848–1919) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954), Ariosophy founded an ideological system combining Völkisch nationalism with esoterism. Prophesying a coming era of German (Aryan) world rule, they argued that a conspiracy against Germans – said to have been instigated by the non-Aryan races, by the Jews, or by the early Church – had "sought to ruin this ideal Germanic world by emancipating the non-German inferiors in the name of a spurious egalitarianism".
Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief ideologue, expanded on the idea of an ancient Nordic migration in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), portraying old Persians as "Aryans with northern blood" who eventually degenerated due to intermixing with so-called 'lower races'. He used Persian history as a cautionary example of miscegenation ( Bastardierung). This view was shared by many Nazi ideologues, who believed that the decline of the Aryan race was caused by infiltration ( Überfremdung) from 'Semitic races'. In 1935, Nazis founded the Ahnenerbe to research 'Aryan prehistory' through classicist and anthropological works. Its president, Walther Wüst, believed that the Germans were directly descended from the Aryan 'Nordic race', which spread into Asia until racial mixing led to 'degeneration' ( Entartung) and 'denordification' ( Entnordnung).
In the late 19th century, student fraternities in Austria and Germany already used 'Aryan clauses' to exclude Jews. However, the Third Reich was the first to incorporate the term Aryan into national law. On 7 April 1933, Berlin enacted the 'Aryan paragraph' ( Arierparagraph) as part of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Terms such as 'Proof of Aryan Ancestry' ( Ariernachweis) and 'Aryanisation' ( Arisierung) soon became common legal language, all primarily aimed at targeting Jews. In September 1935, the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, requiring all Aryan Reich citizens to prove their Aryan ancestry. One way to do this was to obtain an Ahnenpass ('ancestor pass') by providing baptismal certificates that verified all four grandparents were of Aryan descent.Ehrenreich, Eric (2007). The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution, p. 68 In December of the same year, the Nazis founded Lebensborn ('Fount of Life') to counteract the falling Aryan birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.'s sculpture Die Partei (The Party), depicting a Nazi-era ideal of the "Nordic Aryan" racial type]]Many American white supremacist Neo-Nazism groups and prison gangs refer to themselves as 'Aryans', including the Aryan Brotherhood, the Aryan Nations, the Aryan Republican Army, the White Aryan Resistance, or the Aryan Circle. Modern nationalist political groups and neo-Pagan movements in Russia claim a direct linkage between themselves as Slavs and the ancient 'Aryans', and in some Indian nationalist circles, the term 'Aryan' can also be used in reference to an alleged Aryan 'race'.
In recent decades, the idea of an Aryan migration into India has been disputed mainly by Indian scholars, who claim various alternate Indigenous Aryans scenarios contrary to established Kurgan model. However, these alternate scenarios are rooted in traditional and religious views on Indian history and identity and are universally rejected in mainstream scholarship. According to Michael Witzel, the "indigenous Aryans" position is not scholarship in the usual sense, but an "apologetic, ultimately religious undertaking". A number of other alternative theories have been proposed including Anatolian hypothesis, Armenian hypothesis, the Paleolithic continuity theory but these are not widely accepted and have received little or no interest in mainstream scholarship.
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