Albert Grünwedel (31 July 1856 – 28 October 1935) was a German Indologist, Tibetologist, archaeologist, and explorer of Central Asia. He was one of the first scholars to study the Lepcha language.

Life

Grünwedel was born in Munich in 1856, the son of a painter. He studied art history and Asian languages, including Avestan, and in 1883 earned his doctorate at the University of Munich. In 1881 he began work as an assistant at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin and in 1883 he was appointed deputy director of the ethnographic collection. Grünwedel won accolades for his numerous publications on Buddhist art, archaeology Central Asia, and Himalayan languages. Two notable works were Buddhist art in India (1893) and Mythology of Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia (1900), which concerned the Greek origins of the Gandharan Greco-Buddhist artistic style and its development in Central Asia. In 1899 Grünwedel was invited to join a Russian archaeological research expedition led by Vasily Radlov into the north of Xinjiang province, China. In the same year he was appointed a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1902-1903 Grünwedel led the first German expedition to Turpan, in Xinjiang, becoming the first modern European to study the massive ruins near Gaochang. He recorded the events of this expedition in his book Report on Archaeological work in Idikutschahri and Surrounding areas in Winter 1902-1903 (1905). The next expedition was led by Albert von Le Coq, who became famous for removing large numbers of frescos from sites across Xinjiang. Grünwedel himself headed the third German Turfan expedition in 1905–1907, the results of which were published in Ancient Buddhist Religion in Chinese Turkistan (1912). Grünwedel's expeditions were largely funded by the Krupp family. Grünwedel was joined by Heinrich Lüders who made major contributions to the epigraphical analysis of the Turpan-Expedition findings after being called to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Berlin as Professor for oriental languages in 1909. Grünwedel retired in 1921, and in 1923 moved to Bavaria, where his spent his last years at Bad Tölz writing a number of scientific papers.

Later works

A progressive illness, while not depriving him of energy and memory, repeatedly robbed him of the ability to differentiate between delusion and reality, from texts as early as 1920. Waldschmidt writes: “Already in some sections of ‘Alt-Kutscha’ it is difficult to distinguish between things based on facts, speculation and invention,” To an even greater extent this is true for such late works as Die Teufel des Avesta und ihre Beziehungen zur Ikonographie des Buddhismus Zentral-Asiens, Die Legende des Na Ro Pa, or Tusca, in which Grünwedel claimed to have solved the problem of the origins of the Etruscans. Colleagues in the field sharply criticised these works but nevertheless [had] not simply ignored them. In his later works Grünwedel became obsessed with the false idea that the Indian Buddhist Kālacakra tantra system of mysticism was "a Buddhist modification of Manichaeism" (eine buddhistische Modifizierung des Manichäismus; Alt-Kutscha 1920, p. 1.77). Based upon this delusion, Grünwedel forged "Tibetan" maps of Shambhala, the mythic Central Asian homeland of the Kālacakra, and he forged a Tibetan-language Indian Kālacakra text that claims that Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, was an emanation of the Indian Buddhist deity Avalokiteśvara. Although some have attributed the aberrations in Grünwedel's later works to mental illness, his carefully crafted Kālacakra forgeries exhibit vast Orientalist learning and considerable philological skill. Despite contemporaneous doubts, Grünwedel's speculations about “Etruscan Satanism” (in his book Tusca) were adopted by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg for The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Grünwedel died in a mental hospital in Lenggries in 1935.

Works

Works about Grünwedel