Medaille Brockhaus, Fleischer, Pott, Roediger 1870

Hermann Brockhaus (January 28, 1806 – January 5, 1877) was a German Orientalist born in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

. He was a leading authority on

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

and

Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and ...

s. He was the son of publisher

Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (4 May 1772 – 20 August 1823) was a German encyclopedia publisher and editor, famed for publishing the '' Conversations-Lexikon'', which is now published as the Brockhaus encyclopedia. Biography Brockhaus was edu ...

and brother-in-law to composer

Richard Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...

.ADB:Brockhaus, Hermann
In:

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie ''Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie'' (ADB, german: Universal German Biography) is one of the most important and comprehensive biographical reference works in the German language. It was published by the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Aca ...

(ADB). Band 47, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1903, S. 263–272. In 1870 he received a combined medal (together with ( Fleischer, Pott and Rödiger) in occasion of the 25th anniversary of the DMG.

Academic career

He studied

Oriental languages A wide variety of languages are spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turk ...

at the Universities of

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

and

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

where he was a student of

August Wilhelm von Schlegel August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (; 8 September 176712 May 1845), usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His trans ...

, the founder of German

Indology Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the History of India, history and Culture of India, cultures, Languages of South Asia, languages, and Indian literature, literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a ...

. Afterwards he spent several years in France and England. In 1839 he was appointed associate professor of oriental languages at the

University of Jena The University of Jena, officially the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (german: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, abbreviated FSU, shortened form ''Uni Jena''), is a public research university located in Jena, Thuringia, Germany. The un ...

, teaching

and Hebrew beginning in the summer term of 1840.Herausragende Gelehrte der Alma mater , Der Indologe und Orientalist Hermann Brockhaus
Leipziger Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Together with his colleague

Johann Gustav Stickel Johann Gustav Stickel (7 July 1805 – 21 January 1896) was a German theologian, orientalist and numismatist at Jena University. Biography Stickel was born in Eisenach in 1805. He went to school in Buttelstedt and in Weimar. In his youth he ...

(who taught

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigra ...

), Brockhaus established oriental philology at the School of Humanities at Jena.German Orientalism: The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945
by Ursula Wokoeck In 1841 Brockhaus followed an appointment to Leipzig, where in 1848 he was appointed a full professor of ancient Indian language at the university.Pierer's Universal-Lexicon
(translated biography) After his death, he was succeeded at the university by

Ernst Windisch Ernst Wilhelm Oskar Windisch (4 September 1844, Dresden30 October 1918, Leipzig) was a German classical philologist and comparative linguist who specialised in Sanskrit, Celtic and Indo-European studies. In his student days at the University of L ...

Published works

Among his better-known works are an edition of '' Kathâsarit-sâgara'' (a large collection of tales by Somadeva) and an edition of songs by the Persian lyric poet

Hafez Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī ( fa, خواجه شمس‌‌الدین محمّد حافظ شیرازی), known by his pen name Hafez (, ''Ḥāfeẓ'', 'the memorizer; the (safe) keeper'; 1325–1390) and as "Hafiz", ...

(''Lieder des Hafis''). He also published an edition of the '' Vendidâd Sâde'', an edition of a philosophical drama by Krishna Mishra called ''Prabodhachandrodaya'' and was the author of the influential ''Über den Druck sanskritischer Werke mit lateinischen Buchstaben'' (Concerning Sanskrit Works Printed in Latin Letters). From 1853 he was editor of the ''Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft'' (Journal of the German Oriental Society), and for a period of time was editor of the Ersch-Gruber ''Allgemeine Encyklopädie''.

Notes

References

Stefan Heidemann Stefan Heidemann (born 1961 in Versmold in Westphalia) is a German orientalist at Hamburg University, Hamburg. Biography Islamic studies including Islamic Art and economics in Regensburg, Berlin, Damascus and Cairo 1982–1993; Ph.D. in Islami ...

, "Zwischen Theologie und Philologie: Der Paradigmenwechsel in der Jenaer Orientalistik 1770 bis 1850." In ''Der Islam'' 84 (2008), pp. 140–184. * H.C. Kellner, in: ''Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie'' vol. 47, pp. 263–272. {{DEFAULTSORT:Brockhaus, Hermann German orientalists German Indologists Writers from Amsterdam Leipzig University faculty University of Jena faculty 1806 births 1877 deaths German male non-fiction writers Brockhaus family