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Aryan race

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This article is about the historical race concept. For the historical term, see Aryan. For the ideology, see Aryanism. For other uses, see Aryan (disambiguation).

The fourth edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (Leipzig, 1885–1890) shows the Caucasian race (in various shades of grayish blue-green) as comprising Aryans, Semites, and Hamites. Aryans are further subdivided into European Aryans and Indo-Aryans (the term "Indo-Aryans" was then used to describe those now called Indo-Iranians).
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The Aryan race is a now debunked, historical race concept which emerged in the late 19th century to describe people of Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping.[1] The theory had been widely rejected and disproved since there neither exists historical evidence nor archaeological evidence which supports the claims.[2][3][4]

The concept derives from the notion that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or subrace of the Caucasian race.[5][6]

Etymology

Main article: Aryan

The term Aryan has generally been used to describe the Proto-Indo-Iranian language root *arya which was the ethnonym the Indo-Iranians adopted to describe Aryans. Its cognate in Sanskrit is the word ārya (Devanāgarī: आर्य), in origin an ethnic self-designation, in Classical Sanskrit meaning "honourable, respectable, noble".[7][8] The Old Persian cognate ariya- (Old Persian cuneiform: