The book by Dmitry Kolosov, candidate of historical sciences, tells about the tribes and peoples who called themselves Aryans - “full-fledged people”, spoke similar languages and gave rise to the Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples. Based on the most ancient literary monuments - the Vedas and Avesta and later epic tales "Mahabharata", "Ramayana", "Shahname", drawing on the results of linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological research, the author describes the formation of the ancestral Aryan community, gives hypotheses about the ancestral homeland of the ancient Aryans and their paths migrations, describes their appearance on the historical stage and division at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. e. for two streams. Nowadays, on the one hand, Persians and Tajiks, Pashtuns and Kurds, Ossetians and Pamir ethnic groups, and on the other, numerous peoples living in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and other countries, rightfully consider themselves descendants of the Aryans. This grandiose world, numbering one and a half billion people, is the true heir to the Aryan culture.