How the Aryans Conquered First Europe, and then the World

Europe is populated in the main by descendants of the Indo-Europeans, who were once known as the Aryans. They are the makers of the modern world.

In the late eighteenth century, some scholars noticed that Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, bears a remarkable and unmistakable similarity to both Latin and Greek. It is also possible to recognise the derivation of some Sanskrit words by comparing them with English equivalents. To give a simple example, the Hindu god of fire is called Agni. This is similar to the Latin ‘ignis’ and also cognate with the modern English words ‘igneous’ and ‘ignite’; both of which are associated with burning and heat. In Sanskrit ‘mother’ is matar, whereas in Latin and Greek it is mater. The English word ‘maternal’ comes from the same root. It requires no great stretch of the imagination nor extensive knowledge of etymology to deduce that in some earlier language, common to Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and English, there was once a word relating to fire which had the consonants ‘G’ and ‘N’ in it. Nor is it difficult to imagine that the words for ‘mother’ in those languages all began with the letter ‘M’.

      In 1786 William Jones, a scholar of ancient languages who was at that time the Chief Justice of India, wrote that:

     The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure;

      more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more 

     exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity,

     both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have been

     produced by accident; so strong that no philologer could examine all the three

     without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which,

     perhaps, no longer exists.

Sanskrit, the ancient language in which the earliest Hindu scriptures are written, was a product of Proto-Indo-European, as were Latin and Greek. In fact almost all the languages of Europe and Northern India, together with Iranian, are ultimately derived from this tongue. We know this because of the great similarities between distantly separated languages. Lithuanian, one of the languages spoken in the Baltic region of Northern Europe, is so similar to early forms of Indian languages that it was said in the nineteenth century that a Lithuanian peasant living in a remote and isolated village would probably have been able to communicate with a Brahmin priest who spoke Sanskrit. In Sanskrit ‘sheep’ is avis, as it is also in Lithuanian. ‘Fire’ is agnis in Sanskrit and ugnis in Lithuanian. The word ‘son’ is sunus in both languages.

    The Brothers Grimm are famous today for their collecting of fairy tales from across the whole of Europe. It was only possible for them to do so because they were proficient in various languages. Once the theory was advanced that many Indian languages shared a common origin with those of Europe, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm worked out by comparing words from various languages ancient and modern, the rules by which those languages evolved and developed over the centuries. The race was on, firstly to reconstruct this mother tongue and then to find from where these ‘Indo-Europeans’, those who had spoken this language, had come; where their homeland had been. These twin tasks turned out to be inextricably linked, because once certain words had been identified as having been part of the vocabulary or the first Indo-Europeans, as they were provisionally named, this would shed light upon the environment in which they lived.

     Some of the words in the original language from which most European languages and many in India are descended are interesting, but tell us little about the society which used them. The English word ‘water’, for instance, is similar in some other languages. It is ‘wasser’ in German and ‘voda’ in Russian. The further back we look, the closer we get to the original word from which these are derived. Uriah the Hittite, from the Biblical story of King David, would have used the word ‘watar’. This was around 3,000 years ago. All these words come from an original word for water which was ‘wodar’.

     We know from the words which have been reconstructed of the language spoken by the first Indo-Europeans, a language which is sometimes called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short, that these people had domesticated animals. They knew the ‘gwou’ or cow from which they obtained ‘melg’. The used ‘uksen’ to plough fields and pull wagons. We know they wove cloth because the English word ‘weave’ and other words in European and Indian languages all come from an original ‘webh’. They had a word for copper, but not iron, which strongly suggests that this was a Bronze Age people, limiting the time at which they might have flourished. Studying the language gives us hints too about where this tribe once lived.

     Those first Indo-Europeans had a word for snow, which was ‘sneighw’. We can see this in our own ‘snow’, the Russian ‘sneig’ and also the French ‘neige’. This probably rules out India or the Middle East as the homeland; although of course snow is occasionally seen in countries such as Israel and Syria. They had no word for ‘sea’ or ‘ocean’, but a word for little rivers, which was ‘strew’ and also a word for ponds. There were snakes where they lived; ‘serp’, from which of course the English word ‘serpent’ comes. There was also an animal which the called the ‘bhebhru’, which we know today as the beaver. Combining this with one or two other clues, such as the fact that the people who spoke this language were familiar with both beech trees and birches, suggests a homeland in northern Europe.

   The changes in pronunciation, which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm discovered,  followed what became known as Grimm’s Law, after the folklorists, and occurred at a certain speed. Because of this, it is believed today that what is now known as Proto-Indo-European was being spoken some 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, before it began to split into the many different languages which are now spoken in India and Europe.

     There was until relatively recently fierce debate about the original homeland of the people whom we know as the Indo-Europeans, but with new studies of DNA, the question is more or less settled. Five thousand years ago in the grassy plains of what is now Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan there lived a large group of tribes. These people were pastoralists, which is to say they kept livestock which they allowed to roam freely. We know how these people lived, and about some of their beliefs, not from archaeological evidence but rather from tracing back words from European and Indian languages and seeing if they might have had a common origin in the language of what are known as the Yamnaya people of the steppes. A few shrewd guesses are then necessary to complete the picture. This all sounds a good deal more complicated than is actually the case and the best way to make the matter clear is by giving an example. Before doing this, perhaps we need to see why we call these people the Yamnaya, which was not their own name for themselves.

     The people who lived in those broad, grassy plains so many thousands of years ago used to bury some of their dead in pit graves, covered with mounds of earth. The Russian word for ‘relating to pits’ is ‘Yamnaya’, which has become the name by which this culture is generally known. We know something of the Yamnaya from what they buried in their graves. The bones of sheep, cattle and horses are found there, for instance, together with wooden carts or wagons. Pieces of gear for riding horses have also been found. These people were on the cusp of the Bronze Age, because although they used flint arrow heads, the working of copper was beginning to spread, as well as the making of that alloy of copper and tin which we call bronze. This of course ties in perfectly with what can already be deduced from the study of their reconstructed language.

     The Yamnaya were nomadic pastoralists, which is to say that they moved from place to place as their flocks and herds stripped an area of enough scrubby grass to satisfy them. Perhaps a good modern parallel would be the Bedouin of the Middle East who pursue a similar lifestyle. They pitch their tents in a certain place and allow their goats to wander around, gaining what sustenance they may. Children often act as shepherds or goatherds. When one place is denuded of vegetation, the Bedouin pack up their tents and move on. They use camels as beasts of burden to carry their food, water and tents, but the Yamnaya used heavy wagons with solid wheels. Such a wagon, when fully laden, would have been far too heavy for a horse to pull and so oxen would have hauled them across the steppes.

     The Yamnaya did not arise spontaneously, they succeeded other cultures in the same general area. Recent DNA analysis indicates that they were the descents of hunter-gatherers from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For about a thousand years the Yamnaya culture flourished in a very wide geographical area. North of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, they occupied an area larger than Spain, France and Germany put together and beyond their territory, the limitless grasslands stretched away in all directions, seemingly to infinity. If they needed more room for grazing their flocks and herds, then they simply moved north, south, east or west as the spirit took them. They needed a lot of space because their oxen and sheep needed plenty of grass to graze on and each tribe was constantly on the move in search of new pastures for their animals.

     What is hypothesised is that around 3500 or 3000 BC the Yamnaya people, whom we might just as well call the Indo-Europeans or Aryans, began leaving their homeland and moving east, west and south. Why they should have begun these migrations is not clear. It has been suggested that climate change might be implicated and that the steppe was becoming drier and more arid. Equally likely is that the constant grazing of oxen and sheep made it harder and harder to find places verdant enough for the herds to flourish. This is seen with the Bedouin who are mentioned above. Some of the desert areas of the Middle East have been attributed, at least in part, to the rapacity of the goats which accompany the Bedouin on the wanderings.  These factors, combined perhaps with a growing population led to pressures which resulted for the Yamnaya in a drive away from their familiar lands and into the unknown. They took with them not only their language but also their customs and belief-system. We are still able to discern echoes of this today, in matters such as the significance of the number three and our association of the left hand with what is undesirable and suspect.

    There were no nation-states in that Europe of three or four thousand years ago. Here and there might be an especially strong chieftain of the invading tribes might have fancied himself to be a king and established a realm, but it is doubtful if his writ ran further than the area of a modern, English county. Although forests still covered much of the land, there were many cleared areas where villages stood; surrounded by cultivated fields. The society, such as it was, of the new settlers was divided roughly into three categories. This tripartite division has had a great effect on the culture of Europe since that time.

     Before looking at the division of Indo-European society into three classes, it might be interesting and relevant to the subject in hand to consider the prevalence of the number three in both our own, modern world and also in the very earliest fiction from Europe, which we call fairy stories. Embedded in many of those old stories is the mystical importance of the number ‘three’. People are given three wishes, three attempts to undertake some tricky task, three days to solve a riddle and so on. There are three Billy Goats Gruff, three bears live in the house which Goldilocks visits; everywhere the number three crops up. Why should this be so? Why three and not eight or two?

      Readers are invited to suppose that they are trying, together with another person, to lift a very heavy object. Imagine if the person with whom they were undertaking this operation said, ‘Ready? On the count of four.’ Or ‘On the count of two’. This would strike us as being exceedingly odd. Obviously, we do things on the count of three; not two or four. Why should this be?

     In everyday life, the number three is of great significance. So deeply embedded within European, and by extension American, culture is this number that we take it for granted, seldom stopping to think about what sets three apart from all other digits. We commonly say ‘Third time lucky!’ or initiate a synchronised action in a group of people ‘On the count of three!’ We sometimes voice a piece of old folklore that unlucky events tend to come in threes. There were three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which seems very right and proper, and there were of course also three wise men. The three wise men who visited Jesus shortly after his birth are of interest, because the Bible does not specify how many there actually were. It just seems right and natural that there should have been three of them and that this how we refer to the Magi, regardless of what scripture tells us!

     In the oldest fairy tales, mortals are sometimes offered three wishes. None of these fortunate men and women ever seem to have been given the chance to have five wishes granted or just two. Always, the number was three, which again sounds perfectly natural. The myths of the Indo-Europeans, at which we shall be looking later, contain instances of people and animals which had more than one head. There was Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology; a creature who had been inherited from the Indo-Europeans. There was too a three-headed serpent and also a three-headed ogre who featured in an Indo-European legend of cattle raiding. All such creatures had three heads and never any more or fewer.

     Turning the matter over in our minds for a minute or two will reveal many other instances where the number three crops up and appears to be far more natural and appropriate than two, four or five would ever be. Without ever considering the matter, we acknowledge that this number has an almost mystic importance in our culture, although we are quite unable to say why this should be.

     In the ancient world too, we see the number three appearing, especially in religious contexts. The three fates of Greek and Roman mythology, who also appear as the three Norns, who performed a similar function in the Norse world. Then too, there is the manifestation of three which until fairly recently dominated the whole of the western belief system. This is the Christian concept of the Trinity; the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. All Christian countries subscribed to this strange, triune deity and the fact that we hardly ever stop to think about what an extraordinary idea it is to worship a God composed of three separate aspects or personalities shows us how deeply ingrained is our reference for a system which relies so heavily on buses and even gods arriving in threes!

     The three Norns and the three graces were of course female, as were the Deae Matronae or three mothers. These appear in various guises across Europe and are regarded as manifestations of the triple nature of the Mother Goddess. Sculptures show them as women in the three typical stages of life; the virgin or maiden, the mother and the aged crone. Male deities or minor gods also appear in threes in the Romano-Celtic belief system. The slightly sinister ‘Hooded Ones’ are found carved on plaques at shrines in the north of England. Near Hadrian’s Wall, on the border between England and Scotland a stone panel was unearthed, showing three men wearing cloaks and hoods. These are the Genii Cucallati and their function and nature is unclear. It has been speculated that they are guardians of the underworld.

     Returning for a moment to the study of language, the fact that Sanskrit and Latin had a common origin was deduced by examining both dead languages and seeing the similarities, The same method, when applied to the structure of society reveals something very intriguing. According to the oldest legends of India, those living there were once divided into brahmanas, ksatriyas and vaisyas.  Roughly translated, these are priests, warriors and herder-cultivators or farmers. This very old tradition is of course the origin of the caste system which despite the most strenuous efforts of successive Indian governments since independence in 1948, still bedevils the country.  This separation of classes which we know existed in India thousands of years ago equates very neatly with the ancient Greek arrangement of priests and magistrates, warriors and labourers and artisans. The Romans wrote of similar divisions both in their own country and also in Gaul. In Rome there were flamines, milites and quirites, while in Gaul, which occupied the area of modern-day France and Belgium, the categories were, according to Julius Caesar, druids, equites and plebes.

In addition to our modern acceptance of the mystical nature of the number three, we have a superstitious reverence for the idea of the right hand being wholesome and good, in marked contrast to the left hand, which is felt to be undesirable and connected with evil in some strange way. The reason for this irrational belief is simply explained. These days, when travelling we orient ourselves to the north, because that is the direction in which the needles of magnetic compasses point. This seems quite natural to us, but is really no more than a convention. The Yamnaya who came to Europe though, oriented themselves by turning back in the direction of their homeland; to the east, in other words. This meant that when facing in that direction, the right hand would lead to warmer and more pleasant lands, whereas the left hand pointed north, in the direction of the more inhospitable regions of the tundra and the Arctic. From this old tradition, we have inherited an instinctive mistrust of the left-hand path.

Once the Yamanya or Aryans had colonised Europe, they then spread outwards to colonise the world. All the wonderful things which make up the modern world, the space rockets and cars, electric lights and telephones, the internet, railways and medicine, all these things are the product of European thought and ingenuity. The Aryans have, in effect, created the world in which we live and without them there would be no science or technology.