Ancient India: Its Language and Religions

...contents, which, at least in part, were extremely complicated and often tangled in a maze of minor details. Would an earnest explorer of this territory be rewarded for his efforts, even if he succeeded?

It was a group original: "band" of young German scholars who devoted their energies to this work. Most of them are—or were until very recently—still among us: Max Müller Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), one of the most famous 19th-century scholars of Indian languages and religions, Roth Rudolf von Roth (1821–1895), a founder of Vedic scholarship in Germany, and Weber Albrecht Weber (1825–1901), a prolific scholar of Indian literature and history. Two others, whose names should not be omitted here, Adalbert Kuhn and Benfey Theodor Benfey (1809–1881), known for his work on the history of fables and Sanskrit grammar, died some years ago. There was no need to undertake great expeditions, such as those that set out to investigate Egyptian and Babylonian antiquity. Those monuments, in whose colossal and strange forms fragments of a primeval age meet the eye, were missing in India. The knowledge that was to be acquired was not found in inscriptions, but in manuscripts.* Our scholars traveled to London for various lengths of time, and the work began among the store of manuscripts possessed by the East India House The London headquarters of the East India Company, which held a massive library of Oriental texts.

There was no lack of confidence. "It would be a disgrace," wrote Roth, "to the criticism and the ingenuity of our century—which has deciphered the stone inscriptions of the Persian kings and the books of Zoroaster The founder of Zoroastrianism; Roth refers here to the deciphering of the Avestan language—if it did not succeed in reading the intellectual history of the Indian original: "Hindu" nation in this enormous literature."

Much of what Roth expected has been accomplished or is on the way toward accomplishment. Regarding much that was hoped for at that time, we can now say that it was unattainable, and we understand why. What has—

• The Royal Library at Berlin also acquired and owns a rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, for which a foundation was laid by the purchase of the Chambers’ manuscripts Sir Robert Chambers (1737–1803) collected over 800 Sanskrit manuscripts while serving as a judge in Bengal at the command of Frederick William IV King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861.