Who Were The Aryans? | Aryan Migration to India | India's Ancestors (Ancient History)

Someone said, Clearly this man is talking about the Aryas. And this man is Adolf Hitler. Hitler and his followers, the Nazis, justified their crimes, the Holocaust, killing millions of Jews, because they believed that Aryas were a truly superior race and that they were the descendants of this ancient noble race. They adopted the swastika as their symbol. Now, while the swastika still terrifies people all around the world, in India, it remains, like it has for millennia, a very beloved, holy symbol. And this is where the connection starts. Because India is one of the only places where civilization has continued on, uninterrupted, since the time the Aryas lived here. So who were the Aryas? Some believe that they were the Nordics. And I'm bringing this theory up first, because this theory should be thrown out of the window first. Another evidence points towards the area which is now Iran. In fact, the term Arya has a cognate in the Persian language, Eran. This word actually is the source of the modern country name, Iran. Persian kings like Darius the Great and Xerxes have been described in historical records as Aryas of Arya stock. This most likely refers to the original Aryas coming from Central Asia. And this leads us to the idea that Aryas might originally have been from the Eurasian steppes. This is where the Germans got their ideas from. Truth is, it's not easy to get to the facts. One of the reliable pieces of information we do have is from the time they arrived in India. While some historians argue that they might have been native to India, evidence suggests they were definitely not native to India and that they arrived somewhere from the north. Rakhigarhi, by the way, is a pre-Aryan site. What evidence, so what records do we have? Actually, hardly any. But there's one thing which, although not exactly contemporary, it is still a source and that is the Rig Veda. Rig Veda is one of the oldest written texts that we have from this time, not just in India, but in the entire world. It is largely a religious book and was not meant as a history. And it's not even contemporary. But it was recorded by the Aryas themselves and is an extremely precious, unique and pure source of what it tells us about the earliest history of India, origins of Indian society and religion as they are today. So what does the Rig Veda really tell us about the Aryas? Well, around 3000 BC, a group of people descended onto the land that lies between the tributaries of the river Indus. They came with their families with the aim of finding a new home to settle down into. Their systems and society were fully developed and the land that they found near river Indus was amazing for them and they decided to settle here. They later gave it the name of Saptasindhu. These people were tall, fair-skinned, prominent-nosed, proud people who called themselves Aryas. We know this because in the Rig Veda, they refer to themselves as Aryas. The Aryas spread quickly, occupying one district after another of this land, burning and clearing away dense forests, creating habitable land, establishing cities and dynasties along its sparkling rivers while chanting their sacred hymns. However, do not comfortably imagine that they found a kind, submissive, open-armed welcome into this land because this land already had inhabitants and they did not want these pretty new invaders just waltzing in. The Aryas faced stout resistance from the natives who were already living here and who pushed back on every inch of land the Aryas set foot on. This conflict between the invaders and the natives turned into generations of hard battles and competition for control of this land. The Aryas called these natives Dasas. The Aryas record in the Rig Veda about these original inhabitants of India as being dark-skinned, Krishna-thwached, snub-nosed, Anasas of unsweet-sounding, grunt-like speech and worshipping phallic emblems. Their language was unsophisticated and brutish. Their manners and habits were crude. Their religion was unrefined. They didn't perform sacrifices and they looked scarcely human. The Aryas gave it all away from the name they gave to the natives, Dasa, which comes from the root word Das, which means waste or garbage. The Dasas, despite such an impassioned rhetoric meant to dehumanize them by the Aryas, were actually not so barbaric and unworthy after all. They were skilled. They were good architects because they had built numerous strong fortified towns. The Dasas even had considerable wealth and some of the names of their kings have been demonized in the Rig Veda. That is, when you read the names of these demons in the Rig Veda, they were not actually demons, they were just the kings of the local Dasa clans. The Dasas were also good warriors because they otherwise would not have been able to resist and thwart the Arya expansion for 25 generations. So now let's come back to who were the Aryas and where did they come from. We definitely know that the Aryas came from the North. Their exact identity, I'm afraid to say, is lost, at least until now. Sadly, even the Aryas themselves don't tell us where they originally came from. There is evidence that they were from Europe. In fact, at one point in his work, Patanjali, the father of Yoga, says that Pingal Keshini or Hiranya Keshini, that is, blonde hair, is one of the essential qualities in a true Brahmana. But this statement raises more questions than it answers. However, for any Indian to assume that we definitely are their descendants, well, the genes got too mixed up over the last 4,000 to 5,000 years. There were Aryas, then there were many local tribes, then there were invasions from Macedonians under Alexander the Great, from Central Asians, from Mongols, from Afghans, from British. So we cannot claim that we are Aryas any more than we can claim that we are Mongols or British. We do know that all of this started when the Aryas left their homeland and came down. And why did they do that? Well, why does one leave their home when they are not nomads and Aryas were not nomads? And this question is more than what it seems. This is where the whole point, why this whole story begins that changed the course of Indian history and human history starts. I'll answer this question soon.