ARYAN, fleyan or ar'i-an. The name com monly employed to designate that group of lan guages and that branch of the human family to which formerly the appellation Caucasian or .Japhetic, as opposed to Semitic, was popularly but inaccurately given. It is synonymous in gen eral with the terms Indo-Germanic, Indo-Euro pean. or Indo-Celtic. German philologists com monly employ the term Indo-Germanic in its stead, and on good grounds they restrict the name Aryan to the sense of Endo-Iranian, that is, to the Indian and Iranian branches of the great Indo-European family of languages and the early national communities which these languages represent. It can be proved, for example, that in ancient times the inhabitants of India and Persia proudly styled themselves Aryans, and there is no doubt that the term was a national desig,na tion in their ease. In the oldest hymns of India, the Rig-Veda, Aryan tarya) is employed as a national epithet of the members of the rul ing people of Northern India, as opposed to the Dasyus, the Gentile or subject races, and espe cially the darker - skinned inhabitants of the south. The Avesta (q.v.) divides countries into Aryan and non-Aryan (air,ipt, anairya), and from airy/ comes the later form of the name Erica or Iran, and also the classical Ariana (see IRA NIANS ) . In the old Persian inscriptions. Darius boasts of being "an Aryan and of Aryan descent" tariya ariya ciO-ra, laser. Naqshi Rustam, a 141.
The etymology of the word arya, airya, ariya, is obscure, and the real meaning of Aryan is un certain. In the older Sanskrit, aryl. arya seems to denote 'tree,"loyal.' and `good'—in reference, perhaps. to those of the trice stock, the real peo ple. the loyal. In later Sanskrit arya means 'noble.' Such explanations as 'plowmen,' tillers of the soil' (cf. Lat. arare, to plow), taken to de note an agricultural population in contradistinc tion to a nomadic tribe, have little to recommend them. Moreover, while Aryan. in the sense of Indo-Iranian, is well authenticated in antiquity. little success has followed the attempt to prove that Aryan was used in primitive times by the people themselves as a broad and general designa tion, in the sense in which philologists and an thropologists have employed it. At present the
name is given to a family composed of eight great groups of European and Asiatic peoples, whose languages are as follows: (I) Indian and Iranian; (2) Armenian; (3) Greek: (4) Al banian; (5) Italic: (6) Celtic; (7) Germanic; (8) Balto-Slavonie. (See these titles.) As a linguistic and ethnologic term, Aryan, both in Europe and in the United States, is beginning to give place to the preferable terms Indo European or Indo-Germanic. as a designation instead of Aryan, has not had much vogue; but it is sometimes employed as a sub stitute for Indo-Germanic, especially by the French. who use also Indo-European. As a convenient term, however, for general usage, Aryan has much in its favor, and it will doubt less survive-as an alternate to the more precise designations.
That the Aryan peoples had their primitive home in the Pamirian region of the Hindu-Kush, was formerly the commonly received theory; but of late years the evidence is more in favor of the location of the home of the Aryans somewhere between the Caspian and the North Sea, or rather in the steppe land of Southern Russia (S. Schrader, 1890, 19011. Brinton (1890) made the Aryans a West European development of the white race (primitively from northern Africa ) ; Keane ( 1896) placed the Aryan cradle-land some where in the Eurasian steppe area. Others, like Deniker (1900) and Sergi (1895-1901). prefer to speak of the Aryanization of prehistoric dwellers in Europe ( from Asia ?). In any case, the Aryan is a very ancient dweller in both Asia Minor and Central Asia, and the Aryan ele ment in the culture of the south Asiatic peoples is both old and far-reaching. Aryan savagery and Aryan culture are both well repre sented in Asiit. Consult: Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples. trans. by Jevons (London, 1890), and Reallexikon der in dogcnnanischen Altertamskande ( St rassburg, 1901) ; Taylor, Origin of the Aryans (New York, 1890) ; Reinach, L'Origine des A ryens (Paris, 1892) Ripley, leares of Europe (New York, 1899) Sergi, Mediterranean Races (1901), and the works listed by him. See 1 LANGUAGES; INDO-EUROPEANS.