Who Were the Aryans? Memory, Myth, and Meaning in Indian History
Aryans the so-called Aryans (Sanskrit arya. Old Iranian airya) were Indo-European tribes who migrated from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and beyond in the third millennium B.C.E. They were patriarchal warriors who brought powerful male gods with them as they migrated eventually into Greece, Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and India. The Harappan civilization began to decline by about 1900 B.C.E. and was overrun by northern nomads in about 1500 B.C.E. These nomads, called Aryans, began the Vedic culture in India, a culture with a caste social system. In fact, on the Indian Subcontinent the early influx of Aryans, who arrived in waves from the north sometime between 1500 and 1300 B.C.E. (in what historians alternately describe as “invasions” and “migrations”), accounted for the importation of much of the foundations of future Indian culture, such as the language of Sanskrit. The Aryans themselves in time fully integrated with the darker resident populations of the val...