# Who were the Aryans?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
**Created:** [May 19, 2014, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764 "2014-05-19T20:01:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2014, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/1 "2014-05-19T20:01:03Z")
> **[Who were the Aryans?](https://www.straightdope.com/21342322/who-were-the-aryans)**
Earlier thread of mine as to this very report: [Who were the Aryans? - Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=490428)
The Tolkien letter to a German publisher, linked in the OP, is still worth a look.
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### Author:  [@jezzaOZ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jezzaOZ)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2014, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/2 "2014-05-20T00:21:24Z")
We know at least some of early Greeks were blonde haired and blue eyed because they painted their statues and we see the paint remnants today.
Modern day Greeks obviously aren’t.
The Greeks covered a large area including much of Turkey and many Black Sea coasts. They were contiguous with ‘Celts’ (though there are two types of Celt, linguistic and ethnic)
Oppenheimer’s work on _The Origins of the British_ covers a lot of the immediate post-iceage migrations including from a refuge in Southern Ukraine on the Black-Sea coast. This may well be the proto Indo-European location.
Incidentally, how would an Ancient Greek statue painter fare at the local paint shop? e.g. _“I’d like a gallon of umm, err, you know, umm, like the sky…”_
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### Author:  [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2014, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/3 "2014-05-20T00:30:29Z")
> [@jezzaOZ](#):
>
> Incidentally, how would an Ancient Greek statue painter fare at the local paint shop? e.g. _“I’d like a gallon of umm, err, you know, umm, like the sky…”_
What did the Greeks call Egyptian blue?
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2014, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/4 "2014-05-20T02:40:33Z")
Orange. Completely coincidentally, too, as they knew about the (what we would call) orange-colored fruit and the House of Orange was quite a ways in the future. And oddly, because their literature all rhymed and everybody knows that nothing rhymes with orange, limiting their poetry to describing cloudy days.
I, for one, am disappointed that no Neo-Nazis have arrived to school us on Aryan history. :mad:
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### Author:  [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2014, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/5 "2014-05-20T02:50:19Z")
Did they /have/ paint shops?
On another note, the Kurgan hypothesis’s stock has fallen a bit of late. Many are now looking at Anatolia, which is, after all, the home of the first known Indo-Europeans, the Hittites, though even the Hittites are much more recent than the Indo-European ancestors. (Note, calling them “Hittites” is an old tradition, but it has never actually been proven that they had anything to do with the “Hittites” of the Bible.)
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2014, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/6 "2014-05-21T13:41:29Z")
[QUOTE=Cecil Adams]
But it wasn’t until the **16th century** , when Europeans began studying the Indian language Sanskrit, that scholars realized this similarity extended to several Asian languages as well.
[/QUOTE]
Really? comparative linguistics dates back to the 1500’s? I would have thought that it wouldn’t be until the late 1600’s, or 1700’s, when the Europeans began to move into India?
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### Author:  [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2014, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/7 "2014-05-21T14:29:50Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#):
>
> Really? comparative linguistics dates back to the 1500’s? I would have thought that it wouldn’t be until the late 1600’s, or 1700’s, when the Europeans began to move into India?
It surprised me too but Cecil has it right. (Although I guess it’s how you interpret ‘scholars’.) From [Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)
> [@](#):
>
> In the 16th century, European visitors to India began to suggest similarities between Indian, Iranian and European languages. In 1583, Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit missionary in Goa, in a letter to his brother that was not published until the 20th century,[6] noted similarities between Indian languages, specifically Sanskrit, and Greek and Latin.
> [@](#):
>
> Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti (born in Florence in 1540), a merchant who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included devaḥ/dio “God”, sarpaḥ/serpe “serpent”, sapta/sette “seven”, aṣṭa/otto “eight”, nava/nove “nine”).[6] However, neither Stephens’s nor Sassetti’s observations led to further scholarly inquiry.
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### Author:  [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2014, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/8 "2014-05-21T14:38:51Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#):
>
> [Who were the Aryans? - The Straight Dope](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1174/who-were-the-aryans)
>
> Earlier thread of mine as to this very report: [Who were the Aryans? - Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=490428)
>
> The Tolkien letter to a German publisher, linked in the OP, is still worth a look.
It is, indeed, an awesome response.
I do feel rather badly for poor old Tolkien. There he was, a world-expert and lover of what was a rather obscure niche subject - Germanic folklore - just at the time when the Nazis came along, obsessed in a bad way with the same thing!
Not the popularization of his beloved subject he would have wanted, I would imagine.
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2014, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/9 "2014-05-22T00:18:14Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#):
>
> It surprised me too but Cecil has it right. (Although I guess it’s how you interpret ‘scholars’.) From [Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)
A multilingual priest and a merchant who probably spoke several languages? One or the other describes most scholars of linguistics in the 16th century. Especially ones who studied the languages of subcontinental Asia. Age of Discovery and all. They were there and picked up some patterns.
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### Author:  [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2014, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/10 "2014-05-22T01:43:29Z")
It was William Jones’ famous paper of 1786, though, that lit the fuse. Sometimes that just happens in history.
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2014, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-were-the-aryans/688764/11 "2014-05-22T04:04:30Z")
> [@Malthus](#):
>
> It is, indeed, an awesome response.
>
> I do feel rather badly for poor old Tolkien. There he was, a world-expert and lover of what was a rather obscure niche subject - Germanic folklore - just at the time when the Nazis came along, obsessed in a bad way with the same thing!
>
> Not the popularization of his beloved subject he would have wanted, I would imagine.
No, indeed. He wrote to a friend that Hitler’s twisted appropriation of Northern European mythos had ruined it for everyone for a long time to come.