The Power of the Idol_ (1913), pp. 67–68. The most famous was the _Rig Veda_ , the greatest composition in the Indian poetic tradition. This ancient literary work is written in a poetic language that has no modern equivalents and employs some form of verse in rhymed couplets. At the same time the _Rig Veda_ is a comprehensive document of an Indian people of the later Vedic period who spoke an Indo-European language which we now call "Aryan." Aryan was a term originally used to denote a person or tribe who acted as a mediator between nomadic tribes or tribes of farmers and the sedentary peoples. The Aryan-speaking population spread through the lands bordering the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the North Sea, and Mediterranean as well as much of Central Asia. They conquered people and cultures that were already established and whose languages they also eventually adopted or adopted their own dialects of Sanskrit, the ancient language of religion, politics, law, and poetry. At some time after their penetration of northern India in the second millennium before the Christian era, the Aryans made contact with the great civilizations of the ancient Near East and brought home ideas that contributed to the development of ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Christian religious ideas. These changes in religious thought, and even cultural ideas, were reflected in the _Rig Veda_. It is not a work that describes events in terms of historical events and processes. It is the product of many generations and of many tribes and clans, perhaps thousands of people, whose beliefs and traditions found expression in poetry. Yet in spite of its complexity, it is a coherent document that expresses beliefs in such a way that those beliefs remain accessible to modern readers. The _Rig Veda_ as we have it is only one manuscript in the ancient tradition; there are perhaps as many as 10 or 15 known copies. The great scholars and linguists who devoted their life to studying the _Rig Veda_ believed that the entire literature, if we could recover it, would take the form of some two dozen books divided into an estimated six thousand "books." This is a reference, not to printed texts in the modern sense but to individual manuscripts, which in the ancient tradition were considered as an unbroken continuum of texts. Moreover, the term "book" does not refer to printed pages but to an independent literary unit of a book and then only to the text contained in that book. The same book was transmitted by oral recitation for many hundreds of years. The tradition claims that the ancient scholars who transmitted this tradition carefully preserved every word of it for more than three thousand years. Since the ancient scholars employed the Sanskrit alphabet, any word or sequence of words in the _Rig Veda_ was originally in that alphabet. The script in use when the _Rig Veda_ was first written down was not the Roman alphabet but an archaic Indian script called the Brahmi. After the Sanskrit language was replaced by another, called Prakrit, no one could read this ancient literature in its original form, but the language of each manuscript had been established long before in literary works. Over the centuries these manuscripts became increasingly corrupt as the centuries went by. The most recent scholars have agreed that the manuscripts are in such a state of decadence that it would be difficult if not impossible to establish the text without a great deal of help from outside experts and from the ancient interpreters of the _Rig Veda_ who still live. From the beginning, scholars began to notice that the ancient texts were corrupted to some extent, but this corruption did not become generally apparent until the nineteenth century. Until then many scholars, including Hegel, believed that the ancient texts could be preserved in their original form. Hegel is famous for his doctrine of the "dialectical" development of European history through a linear succession of stages, each of which represents an essential step in the overall development. Hegel believed that he had discovered the principles by which society developed as it was presented to him in his reading of classical literature. He was the first, for example, to have access to Plato's _Republic_ , which had been ignored for centuries because of the unorthodox views of the philosopher, and to see in it the ancient doctrine of a "noble savage" in the ancient world. The _Republic_ was based on the assumption that primitive man was free, innocent, and just and at the same time happy, although he did not know the nature of the political state. In the eighteenth century, especially through Herder, Schelling, and Fichte, Hegel introduced a new sense of the idea of culture and what it might mean to be an "ethnic culture" (the concept was employed in the late nineteenth century). Hegel was a Prussian who believed that by studying the Greek heritage he was uncovering the principles of the entire Germanic family, including the Germans. A sense of race was at least implicit in his conception. Hegel was quite aware that the ancient Greeks were not in his time living in Greece as ancient Greeks. They were Germans in another land, which was in fact the case. Yet Hegel regarded them as "Germans" because he considered them the forerunners of a Germanic Europe, a "race." Hegel was a racist, but he was not a racist of the kind that we are so accustomed to in the modern world. As a "scientific" racists would say, his racism was based on history and science, that is to say, on a conception of what went into the making of a "people." In one of the main theses of his _Philosophy of History_ , he held that "the life of all nations follows the same course, and that every nation has the same origin; . . . from the same fatherland all peoples sprang and will return back to it again." This is a kind of "scientific" racism and Hegel uses it to defend the political aims of his Prussian nation. In his _Philosophy of History_ Hegel takes the ancient Indian and Greek texts at face value, and it is just this tendency that marks the beginning of scholarly deconstruction. The most famous example of Hegel's approach to ancient literature is the chapter of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ (1806) in which he reads the _Bhagavad Gita_ as a philosophical reflection upon the nature of the Absolute as a divine individual, an individual whose essence is divine. But it was this use of the ancient texts that started the revolution of deconstruction. Hegel's _History of Philosophy_ (1822) contains a chapter on the Greek drama, called _Aesthetics_ , which Hegel regarded as an original historical contribution to the modern period. But one can hardly find a more severe rejection of this view today than in the _First Enquiry in Aesthetics_ (1866) by the contemporary philosopher Heinrich Heine, who argued that Hegel's conception of art is based on a misunderstanding of the ancient sources and that in general Hegel's _Aesthetics_ is based on "ideology," in other words a collection of prejudices masquerading as an understanding of what art is. Deconstruction begins in the nineteenth century with Hegel. For Hegel, the ancient Greek and Indian texts can be taken as the origin of Western civilization, but at the same time they are expressions of universal, trans-temporal culture, that is to say that they contain the ideas and norms of "culture," even if they are also the expressions of particular historical cultures. Hegel believed that in antiquity humanity began to discover universal principles that were then "lost" and could be rediscovered in modern thought through the concept of "culture." In the wake of Hegel, Fichte and Schlegel claimed that it was possible to re-create the "universal mind of the West" in the twentieth century through the method of comparative philosophy, which was the result of bringing together the ideas and ideals of the various cultures of mankind. As late as 1914, Ernst Troeltsch wrote in his _Historical Schools of Modern Philosophy_ , that for many great men of thought throughout the history of humanity there was "an eternal consciousness that in the history of mankind is always at work, the everlastingly true and the everlastingly right." Troeltsch did not doubt that this consciousness manifested itself "in all great religious and philosophical creeds and systems," that Hegel, Feuerbach, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Schopenhauer had all grasped this universal principle. The idea of a universal and trans-temporal "culture" is found in Herder's notion of the "folk," and in the work of several thinkers who followed in Hegel's wake, including Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Fichte. They argued that the history of mankind consisted in the gradual disclosure of universal human truths through historical changes. These truths were first revealed by the spirit of particular cultures and subsequently obscured by other cultures as time went by. The question was always: "How can we discover what these universal truths are?" In the eighteenth century, and especially in Hegel, this question becomes a "scientific" question. It is at this time that the study of philology begins with Friedrich August Wolf, who begins the modern history of philology and textual studies with editions of ancient texts. Wolf believed that a universal standard for reading the texts had been preserved in the ancient Greek language and could be recovered through analysis of the ancient texts. In this way he revived the philosophical project of Plato's _Republic_ , which he argued for in a famous fragment of a treatise titled "On the Discipline of Reading," which he published in 1792. Wolf's work is