During the eighteenth century, when the British were establishing their control over Indian, Many of the British administrators were also scholars trained in Greek and Latin. One of these scholars was studying Sanskrit, the language in which the Hindu sacred books are written. He became aware that Sanskrit seemed to be closely allied with both Latin and Greek. The Sanskrit word for "Great King," for instance, is maharaja, and the Latin term for the same thing is magnus rex. Some other words are even closer: "mother" in Sanskrit is mater, in Latin mater, in German Mutter, and in English mother. One could extend that list greatly, but the real tip-off that there was an actual relationship was that the grammar of Sanskrit on the one hand and Latin and Greek on the other hand were too similar to be accidental or the result of borrowing. Scholars were excited by this discovery and began studying other related languages, such as Iranian, Russian, all of the modern Western European tongues, and a number of dead languages. They found them all related and gave the name of Indo- European (from the fact that these languages spread from India all the way to Europe). They began to ask how this family of languages, of which their own was usually a member) had spread over such a vast expanse of territory.

It didn't take them long to realize that most of the Indo-European tongues for which some historical origin was known were spoken by, and often introduced by, chariot-driving peoples. It was only a short jump from this to trying to discover the place where these people had originated. There were various theories, much study and even more argument, but most scholars accepted the idea that the original home of the people speaking the original Indo-European language from which all of the other languages had descended was probably somewhere near to, and northwest of, the Caspian Sea. The scholars decided to call these ancient people Aryans, the name that the Indo-European-speaking invaders of India, and close to that of the conquerors of modern Iran (in which name that of these people is preserved). They pictured the Aryans as a people comprised of small tribes, ruled over by a warrior chieftain who was also their lawgiver and believed to be descended from one of the gods. One of the arguments used to support this view was the similarity of some words: the Latin rex, or "king"; the English word right (spelled in that funny way because it was originally pronounced something like "wrecked") in the sense of "law," "justice," and so forth; rita, the Sanskrit root with which English "rite," "ritual" and similar words connected with the practice of religion are derived; and the English rich, or "wealthy".

This society was thought of as being divided into relatively rigid classes: the warrior/wealthy/law-giving/and god-like nobles, the shamans who assisted them and who were, although not noble, distinguished by "magic" powers of prophecy and the like and were servants of the god of the tribe, and the mass of common people. Aryan society, being primarily nomadic, was dominated by the males and this was reflected in their religion. They worshipped the personified forces of nature, but, even before they began to expand, they must have recognized one supreme god, since the name of the father-sky-god are quite similar in all of the languages of the Indo-European family: Sanskrit Dyaus pitar, Greek Zeus pater ("Zeus" originally being pronounced something like "dzh-eh-oos"), and Latin Jupiter. When the Aryans conquered an agricultural society, they often accepted the local goddesses and paired them off with their own gods as husband and wife, such as Zeus and Hera, Hephaestus (god of the forge) and Aphrodite (goddess of sexual love), and so forth. In the Aryan society, and in the societies derived from it, the role and status of women -- since they could not be warriors except in myths like that of the Amazons -- was considerably diminished, and women were treated as inferior to men.