Talk:Louis Jacolliot

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"Of the Sastras and the Mahabharata, which profess the same doctrines, the dates are lost in the night of time. If we accept the chronology of the Brahmins, as calculated by the learned Orientalist, Halhed, they must possess, the first an antiquity of Seven and the second of four million years - a chronology which strikes point blank at all our European ideas or matter. Such things easily excite laughter, especially in France, the country of superficial spirits and of inconsiderate affirmation. We have made a little world for ourselves, dating from scarce 6,000 years, and created in 6 days, that satisfies all, and needs no thought." Louis Francois Jacolliot (1837-1890)

Soil of Ancient India, cradle of humanity, hail! Hail, venerable and efficient nurse whom centuries of brutal invasions have not yet burned under the dust of oblivion! Hail, farther land of faith, of love, of poetry and of science! May we hail a revival of thy past in our West in future! "I have dwelt midst the depths of your mysterious forests, seeking to comprehend the language of your lofty nature, and the evening airs that murmured midst the foliage of banyans and tamarinds whispered to my spirit these three magic words: Zeus, Jehova, Brahma." " How glorious the epoch that then presented itself to my study and comprehension! I made tradition speak from the temple’s recess. I enquired of monuments and ruins, I questioned the Vedas whose pages count their existence by thousands of years and whence enquiring youth imbibed the science of life long before Thebes of the hundred gates or Babylon the great had traced our their foundations.” “And then India appears to me in all the living power of her originality - I traced her progress in the expansion of her enlightenment over the world - I saw her giving her laws, her customs, her morale, her religion to Egypt, to Persia, to Greece and Rome - I saw Jaiminy and Veda Vyasa precede Socrates and Plato, and Krishna, the son of the Virgin Devajani (in Sanskrit, created by God) precede the son of the Virgin of Bethelehem. " Very few travelers have sought to understand India, very few have submitted to the labor necessary to a knowledge of her past splendor, looking only at the surface they have ever denied them and with an unreasoning confidence of criticism that made them the easy victims of ignorance.” "India of the Vedas entertained a respect for women amounting to worship; a fact which we seem little to suspect in Europe when we accuse the extreme East of having denied the dignity of woman, and of having only made her an instrument of pleasure and of passive obedience." He also said: "What! here is a civilization, which you cannot deny to be older than your own, which places the woman on a level with the man and gives her an equal place in the family and in society." "In returning to the fountainhead do we find in India all the poetic and religious traditions of ancient and modern peoples. India is the world's cradle. Thence it is that the Common Mother in sending forth her children even to the remotest West has in an unfading testimony of our original, bequeathed us the legacy of her language, her laws, her morals, her literature, her religion." “In point of authenticity, the Vedas have incontestable precedence over the most ancient records. These holy books which, according to the Brahmins, contains the revealed word of God were honored in India long before Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Europe, were colonized or inhabited.” “Of the Sastras and the Mahabharata, which profess the same doctrines, the dates are lost in the night of time. If we accept the chronology of the Brahmins, as calculated by the learned Orientalist, Halhed, they must possess, the first an antiquity of Seven and the second of four million years - a chronology which strikes point blank at all our European ideas or matter. Such things easily excite laughter, especially in France, the country of superficial spirits and of inconsiderate affirmation. We have made a little world for ourselves, dating from scarce 6,000 years, and created in 6 days, that satisfies all, and needs no thought.” Louis Francois Jacolliot (1837-1890)

Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890), who worked in French India as a government official and was at one time President of the Court in Chandranagar, translated numerous Vedic hymns, the Manusmriti, and the Tamil work, Kural. This French savant and author of La Bible Dans L'Inde says:

"With such congruence before us, no one, I imagine, will appear to contest the purely Hindu origin of Egypt, unless to suggest that: "And who tells you that it was not Indian that copied Egypt? Any of you require that this affirmation shall be refuted by proofs leaving no room for even a shadow of doubt?

"To be quite logical, then deprive India of the Sanskrit, that language which formed all other; but show me in India a leaf of papyrus, a columnar inscription, a temple bas relief tending to prove Egyptian birth."