Forgotten Connections: Implicit and Explicit Uses of Classical Scholarship in the Comparisons of Sir William Jones’s On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India (1784)
Abstract
The present paper discusses the philologist, lawyer, and (proto-)Indologist Sir William Jones (1746-1794), and in particular his introductory essay in India On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India, composed in 1784. It not only concentrates on how he compared Greco-Roman with Hindu mythology, but while answering it also takes into account the scholarly tradition of reinterpreting mythology in a Biblical context. Although the tradition was centuries old, Jones’s inclusion of Hindu mythology provided a boost for European comparative studies. In order to understand his methods and heuristics, this paper explores three case studies from the essay (Saturn-Manu-Noah, Minos-Manu, and Dionysus-Rāma-Raamah), and how Jones composed them, using the mythological thesaurus the Pantheum by the Jesuit François Pomey.
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