Rudolf Hoernle

Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernlé (often Hoernle), CIE (1841–1918) was a German-British Orientalist.

Hoernlé was born in Secundra, Agra, British India on the 14th November, the son of a Protestant missionary reverend, from a German family who had provided a number of recruits for the Church Missionary Society in the area. He descended from a long line of missionaries which included both linguists and revolutionaries; his father Christian Theophilus Hoernlé (1804–1882) translated the gospels into Kurdish and Urdu, Hoernlé was therefore a British subject by birth; he was sent to Germany and his grandparents, at age 7, and was initially educated there.

Hoernlé attended school in Switzerland, after completing theological studies in Schönthal and the University of Basle later moving to London and studying Sanskrit under Theodor Goldstucker. He returned to India in 1865, teaching first at the Benares Hindu University and later at the University of Calcutta. Eventually, Hoernlé was to lead the Asiatic Society of Bengal and retire to Oxford. He died on November 12 1918 during the global Spanish Flu pandemic.

Hoernlé spent nearly his entire working life engaged in the study of Indo-Aryan languages and is perhaps best known for his decipherment of the Bower Manuscript collected by Hamilton Bower in Chinese Turkestan. He was an early scholar of Khotanese. Various super-powers were engaged in a competition to discover various archeological artifacts in Central Asia. Between 1895 and 1911, the Government of India gave Hoernlé a variety of manuscripts for him to decipher. He also took it upon himself to catalogue the Brahmi manuscripts that were sent to him by Aurel Stein. This is now referred to as the Hoernlé collection.

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