Rudolf Hoernlé

Rudolf Hoernlé , also Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernle , (born November 14, 1841 in Secundra, Agra , † November 12, 1918 in Oxford ) was a German-British orientalist and missionary.

Life

Hoernlé was the son of the German-born Protestant missionary in British India Christian Theophilus Hoernlé (1804-1882), who translated the Gospels into Kurdish and Urdu. Hoernlé was raised by his grandparents in Germany and Switzerland, attended the seminar in Schönthal (Upper Palatinate) and studied theology in Basel and from 1860 theology in London, where he also studied Sanskrit with Theodor Goldstücker at University College London in 1864/65 . He was ordained in 1864. In 1865 he went to India as a missionary for the Church Missionary Society, and from 1869 taught at the Benares Hindu University in Varanasi (at that time Jay Narayan College). Here he met Dayanandi Sarasvati , about whom he published. From 1878 to 1881 he headed the Cathedral Mission College in Calcutta and was then with the Indian Educational Service as the principal of the Calcutta Madrasah. He was active in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, appraising coins and archaeological finds for the government and later the finds from Central Asia in the British Collection of Central Asian Antiquities. In retirement he lived in Oxford from 1899, where he died of the Spanish flu in 1918.

He is known for studying early manuscripts on Indian medicine (the Bower manuscript discovered on the Silk Road in 1890 , 4th to 6th centuries, Bodleian Library) and mathematics ( Bakhshali manuscript , found 1881, Bodleian Library). At the time, the Bower manuscript was considered the oldest Indian manuscript and, after its publication in 1891, triggered a search for further manuscripts on the Silk Road, in which Russian competitors of the British also took part.

Many manuscripts were entrusted to him for editing by the Indian government and he also received texts from Aurel Stein , whose finds on the Silk Road he cataloged. Stein also drew his attention to forgeries that he had previously fallen for and published (A Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1899). He had received it from the consul in Kashgar George Macartney (1867-1945). They were forged by a certain Islam Akhun after, among other things, after the discovery of the Bower manuscript, an intensive search for ancient manuscripts began on the Silk Road. Stein interviewed Akhun and reports about it in his book Ancient Khotan .

Hoernle was an expert on the Saki language , in which many of the manuscripts found on the Silk Road from the Buddhist kingdom of Hotan were written.

He received the Order of the Indian Empire in 1897 .

In 1902 he received an honorary Magisterium from Oxford University.

His son Alfred Hoernle (1880–1943) was a well-known philosopher, his nephew Edwin Hoernle (1883–1952), as President of the German Central Administration for Agriculture and Forestry, was responsible for implementing land reform in the GDR. His uncle Theodor Mögling was a leading man in the 1848 revolution in Baden.

Fonts

• On the Bakshali manuscript, Vienna: A. Hölder 1887 (negotiations of the VII International Congress of Orientalists, Vienna 1886), archive
• The Bakshali Manuscript, The Indian Antiquary, Volume 17, 1888, pp. 33-48, 275-279
• The Bheda Samhita in the Bower Manuscript, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1910, pp. 830-833.
• The Bower manuscript; facsimile leaves, Nagari transcript, romanized transliteration and English translation with notes, Calcutta: Archaeological Society of India 1897, Reprint New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1987, part 3 to 7, Archive
• Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages, 1880

Web links

• Ursula Simms-Williams: Rudolf Hoernle and Aurel Stein, British Museum (PDF; 74.6 kB; English)