"Despite the author’s commitment to universalism, Carl Ritter’s Vorhalle (1819) already looked in this direction. In this text, Ritter speculated that a prehistorical diaspora had pushed peoples from northern India westward, laying the foundations for European civilization. To demonstrate that the Black Sea kingdom of Colchis, mythical home of Medea and destination of the Argonauts, was not an Egyptian, but an Indian settlement, he depended partly upon physical characteristics, arguing that the Colchians’ facial features and hair were different from those of the Egyptians, though both were, according to Herodotus, dark- skinned.©® Ritter insisted that the Indians, Persians, Germanic tribes, Scandinavians, Greeks, and Scythians shared a ‘“‘common root” as well as a kind of primeval monotheism, commonalities that made them more like one another than were some groups who shared spaces contemporaneously, like the Romans and Etruscans, or those who shared it over time, such as ancient and modern Indians. Ritter was not too worried about dark-skinned Indian ancestors, but as the British extended more and more control over the subcontinent, this relationship between modern — “fallen” — Indians and idealized ancient Indians began to become more problematic. Increasingly pervasive was the view that India was not the homeland of the Aryans, but rather the place where Aryans had mixed with darker others, instigating the cultural decline and weakness that would characterize Indian history ever afterward. Those who elaborated this view included A. W. Schlegel, Christian Lassen, Theodor Benfey, and C. F. Koeppen.” That these leading Indologists spent so much time, and spilled so much ink, in discussing this subject confirms the field’s sense that this was not only a crucially important issue, but also one for which a variety of difficult-to-interpret sources needed to be read to yield essentially the same results.” If these scholars used “race” in varying ways, clearly it was becoming a more prominent, and meaningful, part of the study of the ancient Orient."