Noun

1. A member of any of the many nomadic peoples thought to have traveled throughout Western Eurasia spreading a Proto-Indo-European language. (Some linguists and historians dispute the existence of the Aryans as a completely distinct group.)
2. A member of a (mythical) master race characterised by blond hair and blue eyes, and supposed to have originated in Scandinavia, including Germans and other people of Nordic stock.

Adjective

1. Of or pertaining to Indo-Europeans or Aryan peoples, cultures and languages.
• "To give just one illuminating illustration, we might mention the Nearly universal and quite uncritical acceptance by both Indian politicians and the generality of national and international academics, of the 19th Century myth of the "Aryan invasion of Dravidian India" and of the arbitrary classification of the population into Aryan and Dravidian ethnic types Neo-Colonial Captive Minds." - Devan Nair (former President of Singapore)[1].
• "What little we know of the Vedic Age comes from the Rig-Veda. By the time the oral tradition of the Aryan religion was comitted to Sanskrit, however, some of the gods mentioned had already begun to lose their importance. Nevertheless, The Rig-Veda represented a blend of beliefs held by several Aryan tribes."[2]
• "One of the main ideas used to interpret and generally devalue the ancient history of India is the theory of the Aryan invasion. According to this account, India was invaded and conquered by nomadic light-skinned Indo-European tribes from Central Asia around 1500-100 BC, who overthrew an earlier and more advanced dark-skinned Dravidian civilization from which they took most of what later became Hindu culture. This so-called pre-Aryan civilization is said to be evidenced by the large urban ruins of what has been called the "Indus valley culture" (as most of its initial sites were on the Indus river). The war between the powers of light and darkness, a prevalent idea in ancient Aryan Vedic scriptures, was thus interpreted to refer to this war between light and dark skinned peoples. The Aryan invasion theory thus turned the "Vedas", the original scriptures of ancient India and the Indo-Aryans, into little more than primitive poems of uncivilized plunderers."[3]
2. Pertaining, in Nazi propaganda and racial theories, to the (mythical) Aryan master race.
• "The idea that the blond Aryans were a superior race was first raised explicitly in 1853 by one Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau. De Gobineau was a respected ethnologist who argued in all seriousness that the Aryan races would prosper as long as they did not allow themselves to be tainted by mixing with black and yellow peoples. De Gobineau's ideas were widely popular and are said to have influenced Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Stripped of the scholarly trappings, Aryanism soon filtered down to the beer halls and eventually became one of the central tenets of Nazism."[4]
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