In the 19th century, German scholars such as Max Müller further developed these ideas, proposing the "Aryan Invasion Theory." This theory suggested that a white-skinned Aryan race invaded and conquered ancient India, supplanting the existing Dravidian civilization.
Professor Max Müller, however, considers that it may possibly take us back 5000 years.
"The nations who are comprehended under the common appellation of Indo-European," says Max Müller--"the Hindoos, the Persians, the Celts, Germans, Romans, Greeks, and Slavs--do not only share the same words and the same grammar, slightly modified in each country, but they seem to have likewise preserved a mass of popular traditions which had grown up before they left their common home."
Max Müller has given this subject great study, and availing ourselves of his researches we can determine the following facts as to the progenitors of the Aryan stock: They were a civilized race; they possessed the institution of marriage; they recognized the relationship of father, mother, son, daughter, grandson, brother, sister, mother-in-law, father-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law, and had separate words for each of these relationships, which we are only able to express by adding the words "in-law." They recognized also the condition of widows, or "the husbandless." They lived in an organized society, governed by a king.
They had progressed so far as to perfect "a decimal system of enumeration, in itself," says Max Müller, "one of the most marvellous achievements of the human mind, based on an abstract conception of quantity, regulated by a philosophical classification, and yet conceived, nurtured, and finished before the soil of Europe was trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton."
"The religion of the Veda knows no idols," says Max Müller; "the worship of idols in India is a secondary formation, a degradation of the more primitive worship of ideal gods."
Max Müller, says, in his "Lectures on the Science of Religion,"
To quote again from Max Müller:
The great god of Egypt was Neph or Num; the chief god of the Samoyedes is Num; and Max Müller established an identity between the Num of the Samoyedes and the god Yum-ala of the Finns, and probably with the name of the god Nam of the Thibetians.
Max Müller's opinion that there must have been a time when the germs of Aryan tongues had not yet reached the inflexional stage, and shows that while the form of Quichua is agglutinative, as in Turanian, the roots of words are Aryan.
"The father of a new-born child, as soon as the mother has become strong enough to leave her couch, gets into bed himself, and there receives the congratulations Of his acquaintances." (Max Müller's "Chips from a German Workshop," vol.
Folk-lore.--Says Max Müller: "Not only do we find the same words and the same terminations in Sanscrit and Gothic; not only do we find the same name for Zeus in Sanscrit, Latin, and German; not only is the abstract Dame for God the same in India, Greece, and Italy; but these very stories, these 'Mährchen' which nurses still tell, with almost the same words, in the Thuringian forest and in the Norwegian villages, and to which crowds of children listen under the Pippal-trees of India--these stories, too, belonged to the common heirloom of the Indo-European race, and their origin carries us back to the same distant past, when no Greek had set foot in Europe, no Hindoo had bathed in the sacred waters of the Ganges."
"Now this," says Max Müller, "is strange enough, and its occurrence in India, Germany, and Central America is stranger still."
It has been translated for the first time by Max Müller.
Max Müller and other scholars have reconstructed the civilization of the ancient Aryans through comparative philology.
Max Müller, in his "Lectures on the Science of Religion," identifies three major linguistic and religious centers in ancient history: Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic.
Max Müller states, "The Semitic languages also are all varieties of one form of speech.