Viel Königsköpf' auf einem Rumpf,
Die müssen uns zur Verzweiflung bringen,
Wird sie nicht reiner Ost verschlingen.[98]

Goethe classed Indic antiquities with those of Egypt and China, and his
attitude towards the question of their value is distinctly expressed in
one of his prose proverbs: "Chinesische, Indische, Aegyptische
Altertümer sind immer nur Curiositäten: es ist sehr wohl gethan, sich
und die Welt damit bekannt zu machen; zu sittlicher und aesthetischer
Bildung aber werden sie uns wenig fruchten."[99]

After all, Goethe's Orient did not extend beyond the Indus. It was
confined mainly to Persia and Arabia, with an occasional excursion into
Turkey.

To this Orient he turned at the time of Germany's deepest political
degradation, when the best part of its soil was overrun by a foreign
invader, and when the whole nation nerved itself for the life and death
struggle that was to break its chains. The aged poet shrank from the
tumult and strife about him and took refuge in the East. The opening
lines of the first Divan poem express the motive of this poetical
_Hegire_.

The history of the composition of the _Divan_ is too well known to
require repetition. It is given with great detail in the editions
prepared by von Loeper and Düntzer.[100] Suffice it to say that the
direct impulse to the composition of the work was the appearance, in
1812, of the first complete version of Persia's greatest lyric poet
H̱āfiḍ, by the famous Viennese Orientalist von Hammer. The bulk of the
poems were written between the years 1814 and 1819,[101] although in