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In the Western world the swastika is synonymous with fascism, but it goes back thousands of years and has been used as a symbol of good fortune in almost every culture in the world : In ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, swastika means "well-being". Symbol has been used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for millennia and is commonly assumed to be an Indian sign. Early Western travellers to Asia were inspired by its positive and ancient associations and started using it back home. By the beginning of 20th Century CE, there was a huge fad for the swastika as a benign good luck symbol. In his book The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? US graphic design writer Steven Heller shows how it was enthusiastically adopted in the West as an architectural motif, on advertising and product design. "Coca-Cola" used it, Carlsberg used it on their beer bottles. Boy Scouts adopted it and the Girls' Club of America called their magazine Swastika. They would even send out swastika badges to their young readers as a prize for selling copies of the magazine," he says. It was used by American military units during World War One and it could be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. Most of these benign uses came to a halt in 1930s as Nazis rose to power in Germany. Nazi use of swastika stems from work of 19th Century German scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans. This idea was seized upon by anti-Semitic nationalist groups who appropriated the swastika as an Aryan symbol to boost a sense of ancient lineage for the Germanic people. Black straight-armed  hakenkreuz (hooked cross) on the distinctive white circle and red background of Nazi flag would become the most hated symbol of 20th Century, inextricably linked to the atrocities committed under the Third Reich. "For the Jewish people the swastika is a symbol of fear, of suppression, and of extermination. It's a symbol that we will never ever be able to change," says 93 year-old Holocaust survivor Freddie Knoller. "If they put the swastika on gravestones or synagogues, it puts a fear into us. Surely it shouldn't happen again." Swastika was banned in Germany at the end of the war and Germany tried unsuccessfully to introduce an EU-wide ban in 2007. The irony is that the swastika is more European in origin than most people realise. Archaeological finds have long demonstrated that the swastika is a very old symbol, but ancient examples are by no means limited to India. It was used by the Ancient Greeks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons and some of oldest examples have been found in Eastern Europe, from Baltic to Balkans. - Subscribe for Detailed Post - #archaeohistories