Aryans - the name of the peoples speaking the languages of the Aryan (Indo-Iranian) group of the Indo-European family, derived from the self-name of the historical peoples of Ancient Iran and Ancient India (II-I millennium BC). The linguistic and cultural affinity of these peoples makes researchers assume the existence of an original Pra-Aryan community (ancient Aryans), the descendants of which are the historical and modern Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples.
Arctic and Thule Island
At one time, the German National Socialists were looking for the arctic ancestral home of the Aryans. However, oddly enough, the first such a hypothesis was expressed not by a German, but by an Indian. In 1903, the Indian nationalist and Rig Veda researcher Lokmanya Val Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1923) published the book The Arctic Homeland in the Vedas.
In this book, he first dated the creation of the Vedas to the third quarter of the 3rd millennium BC. e. This dating still remains fundamental among Indologists. But the hypothesis of the Arctic ancestral home is recognized as erroneous.
On what basis did Tilak put forward such a surprising assumption for a Hindu? The fact is that he, like the supporters of the steppe ancestral home of the Aryans, drew attention to the fact that the climate of the Vedic ancestral home of the Aryans was much colder than the climate of India.
Belovodye. The ancient ancestral home of the Aryans and Slavs by the hands of the artist Vsevolod Ivanov
Promotional video:
Another point that also caught Tilak's attention was that the Vedic descriptions of the sky refer to the circumpolar regions.
1. The sun rises in the south, and not in the east, in addition, the rise is so slow that the priest will have time to read prayers a thousand lines long during this time.
2. The chariots of Ushas (goddess of the Sunrise) are extremely slow, and people are often forced to ask the gods to grant them light and drive out darkness. So, in the "Vedas" the prayer request to the gods is repeated many times "May we safely reach the other end of the night and that edge that is not even visible."
3. Sunrise is preceded by several dawns that go in a circle.
4. The cart (Ursa Major) is located high above the head.
5. The sun has 7 rays and 7 sons, which corresponds to 7 "bright" months of the polar year, and only in the post-Vedic texts there are indications that the Sun has 12 sons.
6. The duel of the good god Indra with evil demons for the release of the Sun does not take place every day, but every year, and in the struggle, Indra kills the water demon Arbuda with ice, and not with his own lightning, which means that the fight takes place in winter.
7. "Day" and "night" of the gods last 6 months, which corresponds to the alternation of the polar day and the polar night.
This last statement is indeed repeated many times in ancient Indian writings. Thus, the "Laws of Manu" read: "The gods have both day and night - a (human) year, again divided in two: day is the period of the movement of the sun to the north, night is the period of movement to the south." The Avesta develops this statement, asserting that "there are stars, a month, the sun can only be seen rising and setting once a year, and the year seems to be only one day." The sages who commented on the Vedas argued that in ancient times the brahmana priests were afraid that dawn would not come after the night.
Such descriptions, which are often found in the Vedas, made Tilak consider the mysterious Arctic lands as the Aryan ancestral home. How correct are Tilak's assumptions? It is known that after the glacier melted, ancient people began to populate the vacated areas and reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
In the 8-6 millennia BC. e. the climate on the northern shores of Russia and Scandinavia was several degrees warmer than modern, and even on the very shores of the Arctic Ocean birch forests grew. When this warm period ended and the cold snap began, it is quite possible that the Aryans descended to warmer regions.
Our modern knowledge of antiquity allows for such a possibility, which can be confirmed or refuted by other evidence. But the supporters of the arctic ancestral home of the Aryans do not stop at such a likely assumption.
They prefer to fantasize, imagining a certain sunken continent or island to the north of their real homeland (the German Ariosophists called the mysterious island Thule, which lay north of Germany, their modern Russian followers locate Hyperborea to the north of Russia).
This continent is believed to have had large Aryan cities heated by geysers.
Armanism (German Armanenschaft) or Ariosophy are the names of an esoteric system developed by the Austrian occultists Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in Austria between 1890 and 1930.
According to the Ariosophists, in the Arctic ancestral home, the Aryans possessed magical objects or technical devices that surpassed even the current capabilities of man, and for the people of the Stone Age, the owners of such objects seemed like gods. Ariosophists associate the death of Thule and Hyperborea with a geological catastrophe.
According to one of the versions, the island went under water and the Aryans miraculously escaped death in the icy depths of the ocean, and according to the other, the power of the geysers that heated the arctic ancestral home was exhausted and the Aryans were forced to travel a long way in the ice in order to reach lands with a warm climate. If you find an arctic ancestral home, then it would be possible to find artifacts that were known to the Aryans and which could significantly accelerate technological progress.
However, scientists are skeptical about the assumptions of the Ariosophists. Historians and geologists are unanimous in the fact that there is no reason to assume that a few thousand years ago, somewhere in the Arctic, there could have been a later lost island, and even more so a continent. But dreamers and visionaries are attracted by the mystery of a mysterious land hidden under the thick shell of the Arctic ice …
Montelius hypothesis
Close to this hypothesis and another, put forward in the XIX century. Swedish archaeologist Oskar Montelius (1843-1921). In his writings, he tried to prove that the same people, the ancient Germans, lived on the territory of Scandinavia, Denmark and Northern Germany throughout the entire period of human existence, and therefore, it was here that the Indo-Germanic (Aryan) civilization originated.
Oscar Montelius
Montelius went down in the history of science as an outstanding systematizer and cataloguer of archaeological finds, he really managed to trace the evolution of many household items and tools from antiquity to the 19th century, because - and in this he is absolutely right - the overwhelming majority of inventions, devices and craft techniques were invented many millennia ago by unknown masters and then passed on from generation to generation.
Montelius's main mistake was the narrowness of his horizons: knowing almost everything about the antiquity of his homeland and neighboring countries, he practically did not orientate himself in the antiquities of other regions of Europe and could not correctly compare the Scandinavian finds with French or English, and the similarity of Scandinavian monuments with monuments of other regions the continent was considered the result of the gradual resettlement of Indo-Germans (Aryans) in Europe.
So, in his opinion, it was the Aryans who were the first builders of megalithic burials in Europe. Burial chambers, widespread in the north of the continent, were considered by Montelius to be the oldest in the world, and the megaliths, known even in such remote corners of the earth as the Far East or Madagascar, are evidence of Aryan migrations. Such statements were not accepted even by his contemporaries, scientists from other countries.
After the radiocarbon method was discovered, it turned out that in real history everything was exactly the opposite compared to the concept of Montelius: the oldest megaliths are Spanish and Portuguese, but the Scandinavian ones are the youngest. In all fairness, it should still be said that the scheme of evolution of ancient megalithic burials from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula and the sea still exists, proposed by Montelius, only in the "opposite direction" - it shows the path of development and subsequent degradation of burial structures from the south of Western Europe to its north …
We emphasize once again that the Montelius hypothesis was the result of a long-term research of the scientist and at that level of knowledge about the prehistoric past it was practically perfect. But the twentieth century has come, and in it, with the hypothesis of Montelius, something happened that always happens to ideas when they take possession of the masses.
In interwar Germany, the scientific, armchair hypothesis of Montelius about the autochthonousness of the German people in the Western Baltic becomes for the ignorant proof of the superiority of the Aryan blood of the Germans over all other Aryan peoples. Even the French and the British, the ideologists of National Socialism shouted, are not purebred in comparison with the Germans, because they appeared as a result of a mixture of Aryan migrants with backward non-Aryan tribes.
After the Second World War, the history of the Aryans finally cleared of ideology, the typology of Montelius' finds took its rightful place in science, and the hypothesis of autochthonicity of the Germans in the Western Baltic had to be abandoned under the pressure of new facts.
Another similar, but more adequate, from the point of view of modern knowledge about the past of Europe, hypothesis was put forward in 1995 by Marek Zverebil. In his opinion, the Aryans as a people formed on the Baltic and North Sea coasts of Europe as a result of the crossbreeding of the hunters who appeared after the retreating glacier with the agricultural tribes who came there about 7 thousand years ago.
This hypothesis does not capture the imagination as much as the previous one, there is no place in it for the mysterious objects of the Aryan race, there is no sunken island or mainland in it, supposedly hiding the amazing achievements of the Aryan civilization. In addition, the “northern” features of the Aryan ancestral homeland are clearly smoothed out in it, because in the north of Poland or Germany a polar night or a polar day is impossible. In addition, this hypothesis is slightly reminiscent of the Montelius hypothesis, which we described above.
Vologodskaya Oblast?
Along with these now classic hypotheses, there is a more exotic version, which has only a small number of adherents. Thus, the Indian professor Durga Prasad Shastri is looking for an Aryan ancestral home in the Vologda region of Russia. He came to this conclusion as a result of comparing Vologda dialectisms with Sanskrit.
So, in the North Russian "gayat" - to clean up, handle well, and in Sanskrit "gaya" - a house, a household, a family; in Vologda dialects “karta” is a pattern woven on a rug, and in Sanskrit “kart” is to spin, cut off, separate. The Russian meaning of the word "gat" is a road laid through a swamp. In Sanskrit "gati" is a passage, a way, a road.
The Sanskrit word "to tear" (to walk, to run) corresponds to the Russian analogue - to skimp; in Sanskrit "radalnya" - tears, crying, in Russian - sobs. We say "tryn-grass", and in Sanskrit "trin" means grass. We say "dense forest" and "slumber" in Sanskrit means forest. The North Russian "bus" means mold, soot, dirt, in Sanskrit "busa" - garbage, sewage. Russian "kulnut" - to fall into the water, in Sanskrit "where" - a channel, a stream. And there are a lot of such examples of similarities, say the supporters of this hypothesis.
Syamzhena is a river in the Vologda region of Russia. It flows through the territory of Sokolsky and Syamzhensky districts.
The supporters of this hypothesis pay special attention to toponymy, and especially to the names of rivers and lakes, because such names are passed down from generation to generation practically unchanged. So, in the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions the river Ganges flows, and some other rivers of this region also have “Indian” names - Shiva, Indiga, Indosat, Sindoshka, Indomanka.
It is interesting that other, not so "speaking" names of rivers are easily translated from Sanskrit: Sukhona means - easily overcome, Kubena - meandering, Suda - a stream, Darida - giving water, Padma - lotus, water lily, Kusha - sedge, Syamzhena - uniting people.
Researchers note the similarity between the ornaments of Indian and North Russian carved wooden products. The most common motif of Indian carving is considered to be the carved triangular-champled decor of architectural details. At the same time, as some scholars suggest, in India, with the arrival of the Aryans, the tradition of brick building, known since the Harappan times, is being replaced by the tradition of wooden architecture brought by the Aryans from the Russian North.
1. Carving on a wooden door. India. State of Madhya Pradesh.
2. Spinning blade. Vologda province.
It persists in India for a long time, despite the fact that the humid climate of Hindustan does not contribute to the preservation of wooden buildings. When wooden buildings were replaced by stone ones, the Aryans retained the carved ornaments of wooden buildings, and the "Mahabharaga" preserved the descriptions of palaces with wooden carved walls, doors and columns.
Only in the dry foothills of the Himalayas wooden architecture survived until the Middle Ages, and in the states of Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Maharashtra, ancient wooden buildings have survived to the present day.
Researchers note that ornaments similar to Indian and North Russian ones are also known in Central Asia (the vicinity of Bukhara and southern Tajikistan), which may indicate the ways of migration of the Aryans from Russia to India.
In all these regions, the main motives are straight and oblique crosses, rosettes of six or seven petals imitating the sun's rays, swastika-shaped spirals, as well as symbols of fertility - rhombuses and triangles. It is interesting that the triangular ornament is often found in other regions inhabited by the Aryans - in Iran, Transcaucasia, in the Black Sea and Trans-Volga steppes.
But the most impressive proof of the Vologda ancestral homeland is the technology of ornamental embroidery. The patterns used by Indian and Vologda craftswomen are surprisingly similar, and the technology itself is called the same both in the Vologda region and in India. Russian craftswomen talk about the flat surface of the chican, and the Indian ones - the chikan.
Compositions of North Russian embroidery (below) and Indian
It is curious that in the 19th century, linguists discovered another archaic Aryan language - Lithuanian, and immediately a hypothesis about the Baltic ancestral home of the Aryans arose. As in the case of the Indian ancestral home, the main argument was that the archaic language would be best preserved in the immediate vicinity of the ancestral home.
However, apparently, the Lithuanian language remained unchanged due to the fact that its speakers were distant from the speakers of other languages - they lived in dense forests, which were then a characteristic part of the landscape of northern Europe. In any case, archaeologists cannot prove the facts of numerous migrations of peoples from the coast of the Baltic Sea to Western Europe and Central Asia in 4-2 thousand BC. e.