Albert Grünwedel

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.

[1] 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.

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.

[5] 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.