"How precisely did the Aryans achieve all this? It was not through the superiority of their material culture. We have rejected the idea that a particular genius resided in the conformation of Nordic skulls. We do so with all the more confidence that, by the time the Aryan genius found its true expression in Greece and Rome, the pure Nordic strain had been for the most part absorbed in the Mediterranean substratum: the lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither a higher material culture nor a superior physique, but that which we mentioned in the first chapter—a more excellent language and the mentality it generated. . . . At the same time the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language. (pp. 211–212)"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
LibrariansPhilologistsAcademics from AustraliaHistorians from AustraliaArchaeologists from Australia
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
quoted in Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans_ Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
V. Gordon Childe
Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 1892 – 19 October 1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and then the Institute of Archaeology, London, and wrote twenty-six books during his career. Initially an early proponent of culture-historical archaeology, he later became the first exponent of Marxist archaeology in the Western world.
12 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by V. Gordon Childe →
Related Quotes
"Not only are they (the theories of racial anthropology] worthless; they are mischievous. They have induced their vota…"
"By the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison w…"
"The simplest explanation of the presence of a Centum language in Central Asia would be to regard it as the last survi…"
"But as a whole they [Kassites] were not Aryans. Though they adopted the Babylonian language and culture, the local sc…"
"(The Hittite language) cannot be accepted without qualification as Aryan. ... The deviations in the inflection are pu…"
"These [Mitanni] numerals and divine and personal names are the oldest actual specimens of any Aryan speech which we p…"
"No multiplication of weapons of war and battle‐scenes attests futile conflicts between city‐ states as in Babylonia n…"
"[l]anguage, albeit an abstraction, is yet a more subtle and pervasive criterion of individuality than the culture-gro…"
"Aryan people first emerge from the gloom of prehistory on the northern borders of the Fertile Crescent of the Ancient…"
"To whatever physical race or races they [the Aryans] belonged, they must have possessed a certain spiritual unity ref…"