Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

comprehensive reorientation in thought. These were the deciphering of Sanskrit in 1785, of Pahlavi in 1793, the cuneiforms in 1803, hieroglyphics in 1822 and Avestan in 1832–‘these were all openings in the long-sealed wall of languages’. One immediate effect of these events was that the study of the Far East was demystified for the first time, moving beyond the conjectural. The Laudian chair of Arabic had been established at Oxford since c. 1640 but Indic and Chinese studies now began in earnest.70 In 1822, the English sent back from Asia to London the sacred books of Tibet and Nepal that were coming to light. The most important of these was the Buddhist canon–one hundred volumes in Tibetan, eighty in Sanskrit–which were discovered and sent west by the English ethnologist Brian Hodgson. It was as a result of the translations of these texts that Western scholars became aware of the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, as discussed above in Chapter 8. In Germany the philosopher of history Johann Gottfried von Herder was deeply affected by Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta and was moved to render certain verses of Wilkins’ English text of the Bhagavad Gita (translated in 1784) into German. But for Herder his main transformation came when he read a German translation of Jones’ English version of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1789). Schwab sets out the significance of this as follows: ‘It is well known how Herder, in rekindling for a deciphered India the enthusiasti...