This is generally believed to have reflected folk memories of the arrival of the Indo-European peoples into the Indian subcontinent.[citation needed] In the 19th century, there had been much public interest in the discovery by Orientalists like William Jones of the Indo-European languages, and that apparently unrelated languages such as English, Irish, Albanian, Italian, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Kurdish, Persian and so forth were all part of the same family of languages spoken across a wide swath of Eurasia from Ireland to India.[citation needed] The ancient Hindu scriptures with their tales of Aryan heroes were of major interest to scholars attempting to trace the origins of the Indo-European peoples. Gobineau equated language with race and mistakenly believed the Indo-European peoples were a racial rather than a linguistic group.[citation needed]