Carl Ritter

"Rather more idiosyncratically, the geographer Carl Ritter published a Creuzerian study of Europe’s peoples before Herodotus in which he suggested that the true source of religious ideas and of “‘civilization’s seeds” was not Egypt or South Asia but northern India. Here, all had shared a Buddha cult, one that included “a common belief in a single, highest God, a God of peace, and a belief in immortality, together with many dogmas, priestly teachings and priestly institutions, such as reincarnation, rebirth, the Flood, the final salvation... .” Religious sectarianism, however, had forced a Babel-like dispersal of this culture, provoking the wandering of Indian priests throughout Europe and Central Asia; they brought the Buddha cult with them, laying the foundations for a shared Graeco-oriental mythology ~— and also clearly laying the foundations for a later, Judeo-Christian revelation. Drawing heavily on Creuzer, as well as on the latter’s beloved late Greek sources, Ritter explicitly sought to decenter a Roman view of Europe’s prehistory by substituting one that insisted upon a shared primeval monotheism and the “common roots” of the ancient Thracians, Germanic tribes, Indians, Greeks, Scythians, and Persians."