"There were travel accounts and anthropological disquisitions; there were histories of philosophy and a bumper crop of inquiries into the history of mythology, which opened the way for investigations of such favorite romantic subjects as folkloric legends, epic poetry, golden ages, pagan gods, natural religions, and the hidden meaning of symbols. As in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, interest in the East arose remarkably quickly; Schelling perhaps saw similarities between his work and that of the Greek mysteries as early as 1802, but only in 1805-6 did he decide this pre-rational Greece had oriental origins. As his Bruno (1802) suggests, Schelling too came to his iconoclastic conclusions by way of the Neoplatonic, western images of the mystical and wise East, rather than by reading eastern texts directly. Christian Bunsen may have learned Mythenforschung from the elderly Heyne, but he took his ardent devotion to Sanskrit and Persian from Friedrich Schlegel; by 1814, Bunsen was determined to integrate the study of these oriental languages into German culture so thoroughly that ‘‘even the devil would not be able to tear it out!’ The romantic geographer Carl Ritter leaned heavily on William Jones and Friedrich Creuzer, but his remarkable Die Vorhalle europäischer Völkergeschichten vor Herodotus (1819) fleshed out an ur-Indian diffusionary history that was even more ambitious than were their models."