The process of decipherment has since become well known. The fact that there were three languages on the Rosetta Stone was both an opportunity and a hindrance. One language, Greek, was known. Of the other two, one was ideogrammatic, the figuration of ideas, and the other alphabetic, the representation of spoken sounds.64 The ideographs were broken when it was realised that a certain small number of unknown characters, often repeated, must be vowels and that cartouches were reserved for the names of kings, with the father following the son (‘A, son of B’). Champollion realised that the unknown alphabetic script was a translation of the Greek, and the hieroglyphics a form of shorthand of the same message.
When the Bengal Asiatic Society was instituted, in 1784, Warren Hastings was offered the presidency, but declined, and so it was offered to Jones. He had been in India barely eighteen months. His great discovery, the relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, was first aired in his third anniversary address to the Asiatic Society. Each year for eleven years he commemorated the founding of the society with a major address, several of which were important statements on Eastern culture. But his third address, ‘On the Hindus’, delivered on 2 February 1786, was by far the most momentous. He said: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’65
It is difficult for us today to grasp the full impact of this insight. In linking Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, and in arguing that the Eastern tongue was, if anything, older than and superior to the Western languages, Jones was striking a blow against the very foundations of Western culture and the (at least tacit) assumption that it was more advanced than cultures elsewhere. A major ‘reorientation’ in thought and attitude was needed. And it was more than merely historical. Anquetil’s translation of the Zend Avesta was the first time an Asian text had been conceived in a way that completely ignored both the Christian and classical traditions. This is why Schwab said the world only became truly round now: the history of the East was at last on a par with that of the West, no longer subordinate to it, no longer necessarily a part of that history. ‘The universality of the Christian God had been ended and a new universalism put in its place.’ In his study of the French Société Asiatique, Felix Lacôte said in an article entitled ‘L’Indianisme’ that ‘Europeans doubted that ancient India was worth the trouble of knowing. This was a tenacious prejudice against which Warren Hastings still had to struggle in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.’66 Nevertheless, by 1832 things had been turned upside down and the German romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel took a different line. He said that his own century had produced more knowledge of India than ‘the twenty-one centuries since Alexander the Great’.67 (Schlegel was, like Jones, a linguistic prodigy. He spoke Arabic and Hebrew by the time he was fifteen and, at the age of seventeen, when he was still a pupil of Herder, he lectured on mythology.68) In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Max Müller, a German Orientalist who became the first professor of comparative philology at Oxford, said this: ‘If I were asked what I considered the most important discovery of the nineteenth century with respect to the ancient history of mankind, I should answer by the following short line: Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar = Greek Zeùs Πατηρ = Latin Juppiter = Old Norse Tyr.’69
Sanskrit was the key. But it was not the only breakthrough. Schwab identifies five major discoveries of this era, all of which produced a 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 enthusiastic interest that had been felt for an imagined India, spread among the Romantics the idea of placing the cradle of the divine infancy of the human race in India.’71 Likewise the German translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Gita Govinda, published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a tremendous influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, F. W. Schelling, August Schlegel, J. C. Schiller, Novalis and, eventually, on Johann Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer.
But it was the Shakuntala that ‘remained the great miracle’. As well as seducing Herder, it gripped Goethe, who didn’t much care for the polytheism of Hinduism but nonetheless penned the lines: ‘Nenn’ ich Sakontala dich, und so ist alles gesagt’ (‘When I mention Shakuntala, everything is said’). Shakuntala was one of the influences that prompted Schlegel to learn Sanskrit. Jones became as famous for his translation of Shakuntala as for his identification of the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek. Goethe called him ‘the incomparable Jones’. ‘Shakuntala was the first link with the authentic India and the basis on which Herder constructed an Indic fatherland for the human race in its infancy.’72 Heine modelled several of his verses on Shakuntala. In France, in 1830, the appearance of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy’s translation of Kalidasa’s classic ‘was one of the literary events that formed the texture of the nineteenth century, not just by its direct influence but by introducing unexpected competition into world literature.’73 Chézy’s translation included Goethe’s famous verses as an epigraph, in which the German poet confessed that Shakuntala was ‘among the stars that made his nights brighter than his days’. Lamartine saw in Chézy’s translation ‘the threefold genius of Homer, Theocritus and Tasso combined in a single poem’.74 By 1858 Shakuntala was so well-known in France, and so well-regarded, that it became a ballet at the Opéra de Paris, with music by Ernst Reyer and a scenario by Théophile Gautier.