Name Karl Penka | ||
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Died February 10, 1912, Vienna, Austria | ||
Karl Penka (26 October 1847 – 10 February 1912) was an Austrian philologist and anthropologist.
Born in Müglitz, Moravia (now Mohelnice, Czech Republic), from 1873 until 1906 Penka was a master at the Maximiliansgymnasium, a high school for boys, in Vienna.
Penka studied anthropology from the point of view of comparative linguistics and took a particular interest in the origins of the Indo-Europeans. He used the term Aryan in the linguistic sense and also extended it into a broad term of race and culture. It was he who popularized the theory that the Aryan race had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the Nordic characteristics of blue eyes and blond hair. In his Origines Ariacae ('Origins of the Aryans') of 1883 he proposed that the Indo-European homeland was in the far north, the Hyperborea of antiquity. Penka has been called "a transitional figure between Aryanism and Nordicism".
Penka died in Vienna in 1912. He is now seen as a pioneer of racist and anti-Semitic theories in ethnology.