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Comment by sillyquiet | Hacker News Reader

Nah, the naming of the planet came much later, I don't think the planet itself was ever worshipped.

And the Proto-Indo-Europeans are not the Aryans - the Aryans were a much later daughter culture in Western Afghanistan, Northern Iran and India, and probably the folks that had the beliefs outlined in the first pages of the Rig Veda.

The steppe people I am referring to are the people of the Yamnaya culture and related peoples within their horizon. The Mongols and Turks were relative late comers to the western steppes.

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Pretty sure "Aryans" is a 19th and 20th century term used for the Indo-Europeans (or roughly approximating "Indo-Europeans"), hence the association of "Aryan" and 20th century race ideology (e.g., theories of an "Aryan homeland" was in Germany, that the Germans were a pure Aryan race, etc).

The racialists of the late 19th Century and early 20th co-opted the term, but there was a real peoples that really called themselves 'Aryans'. They weren't blue eyed blonde-haired, that's for sure, and the weren't at the root of Europe either. Like I said, they were a central Asian daughter culture. They probably spoke Indo-Iranian and their beliefs were later written down in the Riga Veda as well as being a component of Iranian Zoroastrianism.

('Aryan' is cognate with the proto-Indo-European 'h₂éyos')

I agree, I wasn't disputing that there were real people who self-identified with the term, I was contesting your correction that "Aryan" solely refers to these people. You might counter that the overloaded meaning is invalid for whatever reason, but (1) meanings of the propriety of words are boring and subjective and (2) I'm only saying there exists an overloaded meaning, not that everyone will find it valid nor that it excludes the validity of other meanings.

As an aside, I recently discovered (from my new Iranian neighbors) that the term "Aryan" is cognate with "Iran" the country. "Iran" in Persian means something like "Land of the Aryans", and that in 1935 the government of Iran asked its diplomatic partners to refer to it as Iran instead of Persia because of the popularity of Aryan racial ideologies.

Ah gotcha, yeah, the notion of the 'Aryans' as the ancestors of Europe was a common misconception of early European archaeology even when it didn't have the racist propaganda connections.

> They weren't blue eyed blonde-haired, that's for sure

ok but the world-wide "suppress melanin/blue eyes" gene emerged in that same part of the world (north of the Black Sea) some 10,000 years ago, so it seems that the Aryans could have been as blue eyed as anybody.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091101055254/http://www.telegr...

well, possibly, but as they are probably the ancestors of many North Indian, Iranian, and Afghanistani peoples that gene didn't stay dominant for their line. (Though I guess it shows up in that region now and again).

And they certainly weren't the 'Aryan ideal' as pictured in racist propaganda.

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