Written before the era of modern genetic science, it purports to tell the history of the Aryan race, a hypothesized race which, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was commonly thought to exist and was regarded as descended from the original speakers of Proto-Indo European.Arvidsson 2006:298 Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. At the time the book was published, the Aryan race was generally regarded as one of three major branches of the Caucasian race, along with the Semitic race and the Hamitic race. This approach to categorizing human population groups is now considered to be misguided and biologically meaningless.
