Thames and Hudson, London, 1989, pages 7-272

This was the one work that served as an overall guide to the sources utilized in each chapter of The First Boxers. It is required reading for anyone interested in European origins. In researching boxing origins the reader is stricken with the realization that boxing never showed up as a cultural marker without the war chariot, war engine of the Indo-European invaders. I read In Search of the Indo-Europeans once from cover to cover and then used it as a reference.

Mallory does a fine job of tracing the term Aryаn and addressing its use today. The translation of Sanskrit into English in the Colonial Era had ignited a search for word origins as a way of genetically mapping human migration and conquest across Eurasia. Since the language of the priestly and warrior castes that invaded India circa 1700 B.C., just as their cousins invaded the Middle East and Europe, was obviously related to most European languages [Basque and Finnish, I think, being exceptions] European thinkers adopted the term Aryаn to describe the dominant Caucasian peoples that had emerged from the grasslands in antiquity and imposed their will and culture on more settled farming peoples.

Mallory explains that the use of Aryаn to describe anything other than the invaders of the Indian subcontinent is incorrect. In the liberal academic climate in which he was writing his desire to distance himself from the term—since it had been adopted by the Nazis—is understandable. Unfortunately, like so many concepts that are hijacked, the term Aryаn as used by the intellectuals of the first third of the 20th Century was not negative, least of all genocidal.

The truth was, having conquered nearly all the globe in a few hundred years, and knowing their own political failings as demonstrated by their disastrous internecine wars, thinkers among Europeans and colonial people of European descent developed a number of proto-global migratory and exploration theories. This mania, which found its way into many ad-hoc spiritualist and Atlantis cults, attempted to demonstrate cultural links between people as far removed as Tibet and Iceland. From this writer’s vantage this seems like a quaint Right wing version of applied victor’s guilt; almost a mirror image of the postmodern Left wing urge to homogenize humans; kind of a linguistic historian’s way of saying that all men are brothers.

As the descendents of wave upon wave of invaders, with no real natural barrier separating their homeland from the vastness of Asia, once Europeans—having conquered Asia with little more than audacity and will—found themselves in possession of immense territories and discovered that their ancestors had had cousins there, they naturally pursued lines of inquiry hopeful of a primal link. In this light Aryаn [A Sanskrit term for conqueror or noble], as used by past European ethnographers and linguists, represented an image of a more widely shared past with the greater parts of the Old World than had previously been acknowledged.

For anyone considering European heritage Mallory is a must read. And, for ethical purposes, I must admit that those last two paragraphs are an understanding of mine based on Mister Mallory’s book and not know to be endorsed by him.