Aryan race

The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping. The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by Indo-Iranians as an ethnocultural self-designative identity and epithet of "noble". Anthropological, historical, and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of the racial concept. 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, 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. 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. The term was adopted by various racist and antisemitic writers during the 19th century, including Arthur de Gobineau, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose scientific racism influenced later Nazi racial ideology. By the 1930s, the concept had been associated with both Nazism and Nordicism, and used to support the white supremacist ideology of Aryanism that portrayed the Aryan race as a "master race", with non-Aryans regarded as racially inferior (Untermensch, lit. 'subhuman') and an existential threat that was to be exterminated. In Nazi Germany, these ideas formed an essential part of the state ideology that led to the Holocaust.