The Nazis thought that people like Germans, French, Scandinavians, Brits, etc were part of the "superior" Aryan race. However, I think that some have said that Iranians, Afghans, North Indians, and Pakistanis were the Aryans. Some have said that it maybe both groups(Northern Europeans, Iran, and parts of South Asia). Which group are the "true" Aryans? In addition, if it was true that both Europeans and south Asians were Aryans, how did that happen?
Hi! I took the time to dig out an old thread with some good answers to this by /u/Daeres and /u/intangible-tangering :
As a complement to this I'm going to add some standard notes of my own on its use by ancient Persian monarchs, which I hope is fine with the mods:
The word "Ariya" is a tribal self-identifier that was used by speakers of Indo-Iranian languages. In Middle Persian the word transformed to 'Ira', and "Iran" can be translated roughly as "the Aryans" (not "land of the Aryans" as is often stated, the word "Iran" originally denoted a people, not a geographical region; the latter connotation is only known from the Islamic age). Achaememid Great Kings (particularly Darius and Xerxes, the 3rd and 4th Great Kinga) around 500-300 BC identified themselves as "an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Ariya, of Ariya stock"; the later Sasanians in the 3rd century CE called themselves "King of Kings of the Aryans" (Shahanshah-i Iran). In this later use it is normally accepted that the group of people labelled "Iran" was identified with the practicioners of Zoroastrianism (indeed even in Achaememid times Ahuramazda was called the "God of the Ariya" in Elamite texts, particularly the Behistun inscription).
The oldest uses of the term to identify a group of tribes go back to the Rg-veda and the oldest parts of the Avesta, sacred scriptures of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism respectively, composed around 1300 BC.