Aryan race

The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping.^[1][2] The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by modern Indo-Iranians as an epithet of "noble". Anthropological, historical, and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of this concept.^[3][4]

The concept derives from the notion that the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were distinct progenitors of a superior specimen of humankind,^[5][6] and that their descendants up to the present day constitute either a distinctive race or a sub-race of the Caucasian race, alongside the Semitic race and the Hamitic race.^[7] This taxonomic approach to categorizing human population groups is now considered to be misguided and biologically meaningless due to the close genetic similarity and complex interrelationships between these groups.^[8][9][10]

The term was adopted by various racist and antisemitic writers during the 19th century, including Arthur de Gobineau, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain,^[11] whose scientific racism influenced later Nazi racial ideology.^[12] By the 1930s, the concept had been associated with both Nazism and Nordicism,^[13] and used to support the white supremacist ideology of Aryanism that portrayed the Aryan race as a "master race",^[14] with non-Aryans regarded as racially inferior (Untermensch, lit. 'subhuman') and an existential threat that was to be exterminated.^[15] In Nazi Germany, these ideas formed an essential part of the state ideology that led to the Holocaust.^[16][17]