among the émigrés was the Polish poet, Aleksander Chodêko (1804–1891).
Having spent time in Persia as a Russian envoy, he later assumed Mickiewicz’s
chair in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Collège de France (1857–1885),
where he wrote extensively on Iran.
Scholars elsewhere were active, too. In India Demetrios Galanos (1760–
1833) translated Sanskrit works, such as extracts from the MahÇbhÇrata and
the HitopadeÊa, into good classical Greek. He also translated Canakya’s work
as Synopsin gnomikon kai ethikon(Athens, 1845). His legacy is seen as crucial
for the foundation of South Asian and comparative studies in Greece (Burgi-
Kyriazi 1984).
During the late 1800s, the study of religion found particularly enthus-
tiastic reception among Romanians. In 1885, Alexandru Odobescu tried
valiantly to organize in Bucharest the International Congress for Archaeology
and Anthropology. King Charles I of Romania had a vivid interest in Oriental
studies and comparative religion and, as a correspondent and friend of Max
Müller, proposed to organize the 11th International Congress of Orientalists
at Bucharest. The proposal did not come to fruition, but later, at the 12th
International Congress at Rome (1899), dozens of Romanians were in
attendance, as noted by the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: ‘The number
of members was about six hundred. A notable feature in the geographical
distribution of the membership was the attendance of Roumanians, which
exceeded in number that of every other country except France, Germany, Great
Britain, and Italy’ (1900: 181). By comparison, no Central or Eastern European
took part in the 4th International Congress for the History of Religions, held
in Paris in 1923.
Early Eastern European scholars were not without their peculiarities. More
than their Western European colleagues, they failed to observe the limits
of scholarly discourse and pretentiously mixed careless hypotheses with curious,
non-academic aims. Throughout the nineteenth century, Eastern Europeans
sought national identity and self-esteem by means of resurrecting folk
monuments according to the cultural desiderata of the moment. Combining
Polish Sarmatism and Pan-Slavism, Ignacy Pietraszewski (1797–1869)
‘considered “Avestan people” the immediate ancestors of the modern Poles and
tried to demonstrate that the language of the Avesta was, in fact, a proto-Slavic
one’ (Pietraszewski 1858–1862; Krasnowolska 1987: 196–97). Joseph Halévy
(1827–1917), who taught in Adrianople and Bucharest before being named
professor of Ethiopian languages at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in
1879, vainly tried to prove that Sumerian cuneiform was Semitic, that Avestan
‘monotheism’ was influenced by the Old Testament, and generally that the
Renanian ideas of Indo-European superiority were biased, but he did so at the
cost of importing decidedly non-objective, more or less patriotic agendas into
the field of Sumerian-Akkadian history (cf. Cooper 1993). Árminius Vámbéry
(the Magyarized form of Hermann Wamberger; 1832–1913) travelled in56
EUGEN CIURTIN