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Reinhold Rost
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

[Caroline Rhys Davis] studied Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy with Reinhold Rost.

-- Caroline Rhys Davids, by Wikipedia

I have to thank Dr. [Reinhold] Rost, the Librarian of the India Office, at whose suggestion I undertook this work, for his kindness and courtesy in facilitating some references which I found it necessary to make to the India Office Library.

-- Buddha: His Life, His Doctrine, His Order, by Dr. Hermann Oldenberg, Professor at the University of Berlin, Editor of the Vinaya Pitakam and the Dipavamsa in Pali, Translated from the German by William Hoey, M.A., D.Lit., Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, Asiatic Society of Bengal, etc., of Her Majesty's Bengal Civil Service

Orientalist Reinhold Rost (1822-1896), headlibrarian to the India Office Library, about 1890

Reinhold Rost (1822–1896) was a German orientalist, who worked for most of his life at St Augustine's Missionary College, Canterbury in England ...

St Augustine’s College in Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom, was located within the precincts of St Augustine's Abbey about 0.2 miles (335 metres) ESE of Canterbury Cathedral. It served first as a missionary college of the Church of England (1848-1947) and later as the Central College of the Anglican Communion (1952-1967).

The mid-19th century witnessed a "mass-migration" from England to its colonies. In response, the Church of England sent clergy, but the demand for them to serve overseas exceeded supply. Colonial bishoprics were established, but the bishops were without clergy. The training of missionary clergy for the colonies was “notoriously difficult” because they were required to have not only “piety and desire”, they were required to have an education “equivalent to that of a university degree”. The founding of the missionary college of St Augustine’s provided a solution to this problem.

The Revd Edward Coleridge, a teacher at Eton College, envisioned establishing a college for the purpose of training clergy for service in the colonies: both as ministers for the colonists and as missionaries to the native populations...

-- St Augustine's College, Canterbury, by Wikipedia

and as head librarian at the India Office Library, London.

Life

He was the son of Christian Friedrich Rost, a Lutheran minister, and his wife Eleonore Glasewald, born at Eisenberg in Saxen-Altenburg on 2 February 1822. He was educated at the Eisenberg gymnasium school, and, after studying under Johann Gustav Stickel and Johann Gildemeister, graduated Ph.D. at the University of Jena in 1847. In the same year he came to England, to act as a teacher in German at the King's School, Canterbury. After four years, on 7 February 1851, he was appointed oriental lecturer at St. Augustine's Missionary College, Canterbury, founded to educate young men for mission work. This post he held for the rest of his life.[1]

In London, Rost met Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, and was elected, in December 1863, secretary to the Royal Asiatic Society, a post he held for six years.

Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet, GCB FRS (5 April 1810 – 5 March 1895) was a British East India Company army officer, politician and Orientalist, sometimes described as the Father of Assyriology. His son, also Henry, was to become a senior commander in the British Army during World War I...

Rawlinson was appointed political agent at Kandahar in 1840. In that capacity he served for three years, his political labours being considered as meritorious as was his gallantry during various engagements in the course of the Afghan War; for these he was rewarded by the distinction of Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1844.

Serendipitously, he became known personally to the governor-general, which resulted in his appointment as political agent in Ottoman Arabia. Thus he settled in Baghdad, where he devoted himself to cuneiform studies. He was now able, with considerable difficulty and at no small personal risk, to make a complete transcript of the Behistun inscription, which he was also successful in deciphering and interpreting. Having collected a large amount of invaluable information on this and kindred topics, in addition to much geographical knowledge gained in the prosecution of various explorations (including visits with Sir Austen Henry Layard to the ruins of Nineveh), he returned to England on leave of absence in 1849.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in February 1850 on account of being "The Discoverer of the key to the Ancient Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian Inscriptions in the Cuneiform character. The Author of various papers on the philology, antiquities, and Geography of Mesopotamia and Central Asia. Eminent as a Scholar".

Rawlinson remained at home for two years, published in 1851 his memoir on the Behistun inscription, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He disposed of his valuable collection of Babylonian, Sabaean, and Sassanian antiquities to the trustees of the British Museum, who also made him a considerable grant to enable him to carry on the Assyrian and Babylonian excavations initiated by Layard. During 1851 he returned to Baghdad. The excavations were performed by his direction with valuable results, among the most important being the discovery of material that contributed greatly to the final decipherment and interpretation of the cuneiform character. Rawlinson's greatest contribution to the deciphering of the cuneiform scripts was the discovery that individual signs had multiple readings depending on their context. While at the British Museum, Rawlinson worked with the younger George Smith.

An equestrian accident in 1855 hastened his determination to return to England, and in that year he resigned his post in the East India Company. On his return to England the distinction of Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath was conferred upon him, and he was appointed a crown director of the East India Company.

The remaining forty years of his life were full of activity—political, diplomatic, and scientific—and were spent mainly in London. In 1858 he was appointed a member of the first India Council, but resigned during 1859 on being sent to Persia as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. The latter post he held for only a year, owing to his dissatisfaction with circumstances concerning his official position there. Previously he had sat in Parliament as Member of Parliament (MP) for Reigate from February to September 1858; he was again MP for Frome, from 1865 to 1868. He was appointed to the Council of India again in 1868, and continued to serve upon it until his death. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar.

Rawlinson was one of the most important figures arguing that Britain must check Russian ambitions in South Asia. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar. He argued that Tsarist Russia would attack and absorb Khokand, Bokhara and Khiva (which they did – they are now parts of Uzbekistan) and warned they would invade Persia (present-day Iran) and Afghanistan as springboards to British India.

He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1876 till his death. He was created Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1889, and a Baronet in 1891; was president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1874 to 1875, and of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1869 to 1871 and 1878 to 1881; and received honorary degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

-- Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet, by Wikipedia

Through Rawlinson he became on 1 July 1869 librarian at the India Office, on the retirement of FitzEdward Hall, and imposed order on its manuscripts.

Fitzedward Hall (March 21, 1825 - February 1, 1901) was an American Orientalist, and philologist. He was the first American to edit a Sanskrit text, and was an early collaborator in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) project...

He graduated with the degree of civil engineer from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy in 1842, and entered Harvard in the class of 1846. His Harvard classmates included Charles Eliot Norton, who later visited him in India in 1849, and Francis James Child. Just before his class graduated but after completing the work for his degree he abruptly left college and took ship out of Boston to India, allegedly in search of a runaway brother. His ship foundered and was wrecked on its approach to the harbor of Calcutta, where he found himself stranded. Although it was not his intention, he was never to return to the United States. At this time, he began his study of Indian languages, and in January 1850 he was appointed tutor in the Government Sanskrit College at Benares. In 1852, he became the first American to edit a Sanskrit text, namely the Vedanta treatises Ātmabodha and Tattvabodha. In 1853, he became professor of Sanskrit and English at the Government Sanskrit College; and in 1855 was appointed to the post of Inspector of Public Instruction in Ajmere-Merwara and in 1856 in the Central Provinces.

In 1857, Hall was caught up in the Sepoy Mutiny. The Manchester Guardian later gave this account:[2] "When the Mutiny broke out he was Inspector of Public Instruction for Central India, and was beleaguered in the Saugor Fort. He had become an expert tiger shooter, and turned this proficiency to account during the siege of the fort, and afterwards as a volunteer in the struggle for the re-establishment of the British power in India."

In 1859, he published at Calcutta his discursive and informative A Contribution Towards an Index to the Bibliography of the Indian Philosophical Systems, based on the holdings of the Benares College and his own collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as numerous other private collections he had examined. In the introduction, he regrets that this production was in press in Allahabad and would have been put before the public in 1857, "had it not been impressed to feed a rebel bonfire."

He settled in England and in 1862 received the appointment to the Chair of Sanskrit, Hindustani and Indian jurisprudence in King's College London, and to the librarianship of the India Office. An unsuccessful attempt was made by his friends to lure him back to Harvard by endowing a Chair of Sanskrit for him there, but this project came to nothing. His collection of a thousand Oriental manuscripts he gave to Harvard...

In 1869 Hall was dismissed by the India Office, which accused him (by his own account) of being a drunk and a foreign spy, and expelled from the Philological Society after a series of acrimonious exchanges in the letters columns of various journals.

-- Fitzedward Hall, by Wikipedia

He secured for students free admission to the library. He retired in 1893 after 24 years of service at the age of 70.[1] His successor as head librarian of the India Office Library became the Orientalist and Sanskritist Charles Henry Tawney (1837-1922).

Rost gained many distinctions and awards. He was created Hon. LL.D. of Edinburgh in 1877, and a Companion of the Indian Empire in 1888. He died at Canterbury on 7 February 1896.[1]

Works

Rost was familiar with some twenty or thirty languages in all. His own works were:[1]

• Treatise on the Indian Sources of the Ancient Burmese Laws, 1850.
• A Descriptive Catalogue of the Palm Leaf MSS. belonging to the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg, 1852.
• Revision of Specimens of Sanscrit MSS. published by the Paleographical Society, 1875.

Rost's India Office Library catalogue of Sanskrit works was a significant bibliographic advance.[2] He edited:[1]

• Horace Hayman Wilson, Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and on Sanscrit Literature, 5 vols. 1861–5;
• Brian Houghton Hodgson, Essays on Indian Subjects, 2 vols. 1880;
• Miscellaneous papers relating to Indo-China and the Indian Archipelago (Trübner's "Oriental Series", 4 vols. 1886–8);
• The last three volumes of Trübner's Oriental Record; and
• Trübner's series of Simplified Grammars.

He contributed notices of books to Luzac's Oriental List, articles on "Malay Language and Literature", "Pali", "Rajah", and "Thugs" to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and published in The Athenæum and The Academy.[1]

Family

Rost married, in 1863, Minna, daughter of late Chief-justice J. F. Laue, of Magdeburg; they had seven children, two of whom died in childhood.[3] Son Ernst (Ernest) Reinhold Rost (born 1872) became Major of the Indian Medical Service (IMS), led newly founded Yangon General Hospital in Rangoon (Burma) and was active in the propagation of Buddhism in England.[4]

Biography

• Oskar Weise: Der Orientalist Dr. Reinhold Rost, sein Leben,und sein Streben. Leipzig : Teubner 1897. 71 p. (Mitteilungen des Geschichts- und Altertumsforschenden Vereins zu Eisenberg).

Notes

1. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1897). "Rost, Reinhold" . Dictionary of National Biography. 49. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
2. Katz, J. B. "Rost, Reinhold". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24144. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
3. Weise 1897, p.55
4. Weise 1897, 55

External links

Attribution

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1897). "Rost, Reinhold". Dictionary of National Biography. 49. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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Dodanduwa Sri Piyaratana Tissa Mahanayake Thero
by Memories of Weerasooriya Clan
June 28, 2010
Source: The Island - 6th August, 2005

I pass among ignorant Western people as a thoroughly well informed man but in comparison with the learning possessed by my Brothers in the oriental priesthoods, I am as ignorant as the last of their neophytes. What I call wisdom is the thorough knowledge of the real truth of the Cosmos and of man. Where in Christendom can this be learnt? Where is the University? Where the professor? Where the books from which the hungry student may discover what lies behind the shell of physical natures? That divine knowledge is in the keeping of the temples and priests and ascetics of the East -- of despised heathendom. There alone the way to purification, illumination, power, beatitude can be pointed out234.

To you and as you must we turn, and say: "Fathers, brothers, the Western world is dying of brutal sensuality and ignorance, come and help, rescue it. Come as missionaries, as teachers, as disputants, preachers. Come prepared to be hated, opposed, threatened, perhaps maltreated. Come expecting nothing but determined to accomplish every thing!235

If you will persuade a good, pure, learned, eloquent Buddhist to come here and preach, you will sweep the country before you ... I have spoken a little myself on the subject and written and caused to be written much more. But I am so ignorant. We are all so ignorant that I do not dare set myself up as a teacher236. Our [Theosophical] Society is on the basis of a Brotherhood of Humanity. I might admit that it also is a league of religions against the common enemy -- Christianity.

-- Letter to Dodanduwa Sri Piyaratana Tissa Mahanayake Thero, by Henry Steel Olcott, from Theosophists and Buddhists, Excerpt from White Sahibs, Brown Sahibs: Tracking Dharmapala, by Susantha Goonatilake

After a two-year correspondence with Ven. Piyarathne Thissa, [Olcott] and Blavatsky arrived in the then capital Colombo on May 16, 1880.

-- Henry Steel Olcott, by Wikipedia

A quaint stillness permeates the seaboard that was devastated in the tsunami six months ago. Away from the hustle and bustle of the towns, the villages Rathgama and Dodanduwa exude an aura of distinct quietude with men and women going about their daily work. Around the village the abundance of the Rathgama lagoon, a sprawling sheet of shimmering aquatic delight rich in its biodiversity, brings a comforting breeze to the locality. It is like an ancient giant silently watching over the poor villages where women spin coconut fibre strings or make loose strands of fibre the difficult way, beating hard on the coconut husks soaked in the lake with wooden machetes, till the sinews of their hands ache from sheer physical exertion day in, day out. All that labour for a mere pittance, in a country with a milieu virtually adulating the so-called market economy and the "level playing field". The product of incessant labour drips from their hands and faces in the form of drops of sweat, which the celebrated Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote was where God made his abode.

When one passes the Dodanduwa bridge on the Galle Road ancient single storey buildings that line the road among the newly built markets or kiosks seem to beckon one to an age of prosperity and bygone resurgence towards the latter half of the 19th century when Buddhist leaders like the Most Ven Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Nayake Thera attracted Western intellectuals like the American theosophist Col. Henry Steele Olcott. Olcott came here to learn the rich cultural and religious heritage of this country and unlearn some of the pseudo-intellectual teachings and beliefs of the newly civilized Western world.

Less than a kilometre from the Dodanduwa Bridge is a turnoff to the left that leads to interior hamlets of the main village and a special school. A memorial complete with a statue of another bhikku, Ven Sasanalankara Vinayacharya Siri Piyaratna Tissa Nayake Thera (known as Dodanduwe Piyaratana Nayake Thera), who placed Dodanduwa in the annals of the country’s education history can be seen at the turn. He was pious and erudite monk whose efforts made this school a reality one and a half centuries ago. A name board stands opposite the statue, Dodanduwa Piyaratana Vidyalaya, the first Buddhist school established in the colonial era after the British introduced their system of school education replacing our own system of education that was thousands of years old.

Chapter Nine: Education

9.1 British Educational Policy, 1796-1867

The history of education in nineteenth century Ceylon is closely linked with several other aspects of British policy in the island. In the first place, the state of the government revenue – that itself depended heavily on the fortunes of the plantation industry -- set up the financial framework, within which colonial educational policy could be realised. As the propagation of education has never been a preference of the British administration throughout the nineteenth century, expenditure on educational facilities has often been the first to suffer during times of financial difficulties. Second, the British approach to the education of the Crown's 'native subjects' was only partly based on humanitarian thoughts. Practical considerations constantly influenced education policies. The want of English-speaking clerks for the lower ranks of the administration, for instance, led to an emphasis on English education in the wake of the Colebrooke-Cameron report. Later, the policy was reversed. The administrative machinery could not absorb the newly created English-educated class anymore. Third, the competition of the various religious bodies and groups in Ceylon played a significant role in the development of education in Ceylon. At first, the struggle for predominance in the field of education was mainly a struggle between different Christian missionary societies. Later -- in the course of the so-called 'religious revivals’ that will be discussed in detail in a later chapter -- the representatives of the indigenous religious faiths joined the competition as well.

Until the implementation of the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms in the early 1830s, the propagation of education was largely neglected by the colonial government. When the British took over the Dutch possessions on the island, two separate school system existed. The Dutch had established a network of Christian parish schools that had been under central government control. Outside this system there existed a fairly large number of traditional Buddhist schools. These pansala schools were attached to Buddhist monasteries and managed by the clergy.1 Most of the pansalas were located in the Kandyan highlands (and, therefore, came under British authority only in 1815). The pansala network was less tight in the Maritime Provinces. During the administration of the East India Company from 1796 to 1798, education was not considered particularly important and the Dutch parish schools fell into complete neglect. Only with the arrival of Governor Frederick North in 1798 these schools were revived again and soon stood at the centre of the government's education policy. North -- who is said to have been influenced by religious motives more than by educational ones -- appointed the Colonial Chaplain Rev. James A. Cordiner as Principal of Schools. North and Cordiner showed a keen interest in the establishment of a network or vernacular schools, but in 1803 their ambitions were put to a stop by the Colonial Office's retrenchment policy. The parish schools were abolished on financial grounds and only the English Academy -- established by North as the first English school in Ceylon in 1800 -- survived the cutting back of funds.2

North's successors, Thomas Maitland and Robert Brownrigg, did not revive the parish schools. While Maitiand showed no interest in the propagation of education at all, Brownrigg's Governorship saw the arrival of four important missionary societies on the island. In 18 12, the Baptist Missionary Society came to Ceylon and started to set up missionary schools. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society followed in 1814, the American Mission in 1816 and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1818.3 The Wesleyans, the CMS and – on a smaller scale -- the Baptists immediately started to establish schools in the centres of the maritime regions -- preferably in and around Colombo.4 Due to political reasons, the American Mission was not allowed into Colombo and, thus, concentrated solely on missionary activity in the Jaffna peninsula.

The missionary societies regarded education as the principal vehicle of conversion and mainly established vernacular schools to reach the mass of the 'heathens.’ In these schools the local languages -- i.e. Sinhala or Tamil -- were used for the instruction of the pupils.5 Under Brownrigg, the colonial government's education policy confined itself to supporting the activities of the missionary bodies. In 1817, an Archdeaconry (subordinate to Calcutta) was established in Ceylon and the Church of England became the official church of the state. The remaining government schools came under the supervision of the Church of England and its Ecclesiastical Establishment.6

The missionaries were admitted to the Kandyan regions in 1820. After the conquest of Kandy in 1815, the Kandyan Convention had assured British protection to Buddhism, but with the suppression of the Kandyan Rebellion in 1818 a new proclamation was issued that limited government support to Buddhism. Moreover, Brownrigg officially extended government protection to all religions and, therefore, found it possible to open the Kandyan regions to the missionary bodies.7

Thanks to Brownrigg's support, the missionary societies soon occupied a more important position than the government in the spread of education. Under Brownrigg's successor Edward Barnes, the role of the missionaries became even more pronounced as Barnes showed interest only in the economic progress of the island. He did not actively support the missionary societies, but, due to government neglect, he left educational matters almost completely to the churches. Jayaweera states that Barnes "discouraged educational enterprise, state or private, and all but killed state schools; the latter were reduced to four English and ninety parish schools by 1830.”8 When Colebrooke arrived in Ceylon in 1829, the missionary bodies practically controlled the educational system of the island -- partly due to the active support of Brownrigg, partly due to Barnes' indifference.

As he did on most matters of colonial administration, Colebrooke also commented on the prevalent system of education. Sumathipala points out that, when Colebrooke investigated educational matters on the island, only about 800 pupils (out of a total of 26,970) received an English education. About half of those attended the five existing government English schools.9 As Colebrooke occupied a more practical viewpoint concerning the future of education in Ceylon,10 he recommended to discontinue any government activity in the spheres of vernacular education and laid additional emphasis on the importance of English education on the island. In his opinion, the intended opening of the lower ranks of the CCS to the Ceylonese required English-educated personnel. The spread of Western -- i.e. British – ideas and values would unify the island and foster local participation in the administration and judicature.11 Consequently, Governor Horton -- whose task it was to implement most of Colebrooke's recommendations -- closed all government vernacular schools. Furthermore, government English schools were closed in many locations where missionary schools already taught English. Thus, the missionaries were given an additional inducement to engage in English education12 as Colebrooke objected to the missionaries' preference for vernacular education.13 The Archdeacon of the Church of England became the head of the first School Commission in 1834. This commission implemented Colebrooke's recommendations almost to the letter and concentrated entirely on the establishment of English schools.14 The missionary societies soon followed the government policy and laid their emphasis on the foundation of English schools as well.15 The School Commission managed to expand educational facilities (primarily for the teaching of English) in the next years. However, the government schools constantly lost more ground to the rapidly spreading missionary schools.

The School Commission and its policy exclusively represented the Church of England -- the Anglicans. No members of other religious instruction was made a compulsory subject in government schools. Only in 1841 Governor Stewart Mackenzie reorganized the mission and created the Central School Commission. In the new commission Presbyterians, Roman Cathoiics, Wesleyans and Anglicans were all given a voice -- but none of the indigenous religious faiths was represented.16 The creation of the Central School Commission triggered several changes in the educational policy of Ceylon. From 1841 on, government schools were open to children of all Christian denominations. Furthermore, the first grant-in-aid system for nongovernment English schools was introduced and enabled missionary English schools to receive a government grant (provided that they allowed inspection and examination by the commission). As they had a long tradition of English teaching, schools in Jaffna made particular use of the grant-in-aid system and, consequently, several government schools in the peninsula were closed down.17

The Wesleyan Rev. William Gogerly presided the commission from 1843 onwards and implemented a comparatively progressive policy. Together with Governor Colin Campbell he introduced several new schemes. In 1843, the Central School Commission made provisions for vernacular education in elementary schools. In 1845, a Native Normal School for the training of teachers in vernacular education was established. Two years later, 30 vernacular schools were opened.18 As a consequence, government expenditure on education rose from £2,999 in the year 1841 to £11,4-15 in 1847 19 (i.e. from 0.8% to 2.2% of the total expenditure).20

In the course of the first serious coffee crisis in 1848 and the following financial depression, government expenditure on education was drastically reduced. Vernacular education suffered hardest. Although most government vernacular schools continued to exist, the introduction of fees and the closing down of the Native Normal School prevented further progress in vernacular education.21 The neglect of education policy continued when the depression had been overcome and the coffee mania of the 1850s had set in. Economic advance and the improvement of the infrastructure were the sole interest of the administration during that time. Without government guidance the policy of the Central School Commission changed almost every year during the 1850s -- laying emphasis on English education in one year and promoting vernacular instruction in the next.22 Education, therefore, remained largely the domain of the missionary bodies. The Christian supremacy in the field was underlined by the Central School Commission's policy to give grants exclusively to schools run by Christian institutions.23 No pansala or other non-Christian school had ever received a grant so far.

In the 1860s, the Roman Catholic community -- led by the Archbishop of Colombo Christopher Bonjean -- put up first resistance to the prevailing system. When the Tamil MLC Muttu Coomaraswamy (backed by the Burgher MLC Martenz) requested the creation of a special committee to investigate the matter, a Subcommittee of the Legislative Council was eventually appointed to conduct inquires about the state of education in Ceylon.24 In 1865, the Morgan Committee -- named after its president, Queen's Advocate Richard F. Morgan -- took up its work.

9.2 The Morgan Committee and the Department of Public Instruction

The Morgan Committee presented its final report in 1867. The implementation of its proposals not only placed the administration of education on a sound institutional footing but also led to a reversal of government educational policy on the island. Of the various changes advocated by the Committee only three major points shall be discussed here: the establishment of the Department of Public Instruction, the emphasis on vernacular education and the introduction of the so-called Denominational System based on a revised grant-in-aid system. Governor Hercules Robinson said in an address to the Legislative Council in 1870:

I have to announce to you the adoptions of a distinct policy the tendency of which will be to extend the operations of government in the direction of establishing village schools as yet unprovided with the means of instruction, but gradually to contract its operations in respect of English schools in the lawn districts where an effective system of grant-in-aid will enable the government to employ its funds to much greater advantage than in maintaining schools of its own.25

From 1869/70 onwards, the Committee's proposals were gradually realised. The Morgan Report expressed the opinion that the government had an obligation to spread (vernacular) education in the entire island. It has been said that the Committee's views had not so much been shaped by the needs of the population but "by the current trends in England and India which favoured some form of state responsibility for education."26 Accordingly, vernacular education gained new momentum with the implementation of the Report's proposals. The number of government vernacular schools increased from 64 in 1869 to 347 in 1881.27 The report also proposed the abolition of government English elementary schools on the assumption that superior (i.e. English) education was only required by a small minority of the population. Superior Central schools -- already existent in some of the population centres -- and Anglo-vernacular schools28 [28. In Anglo-vernacular schools English was not the medium of instruction, but merely a subject. The pupils learned English with explanations and instructions given in the vernacular.] should provide the necessary facilities for those who could afford an English education. All school fees for vernacular education were abolished, whereas superior English education was only available against the payment of substantial fees.29 Wickremeratne even holds that it was one of the main goals of the colonial government's educational policy after 1867 to retain the growing educational gap.30

The inefficiency of the Central School Commission was demonstrated by its last report of the year 1867. The report showed that since 1840 only 86 new schools had been established.31 The Morgan Committee decided to do away with the Commission and create the Department of Public Instruction. The Governor, the Executive Council and the School Commission suggested the additional creation of an advisory board -– consisting of representatives of all races and denominations -– to control and assist the Director of Public Instructions. But Morgan opposed this view, and, on his advice, the Legislative Council voted against the establishment of such a board.32 Consequently, the Director of Public Instruction was directly and solely responsible for the implementation of the government's educational policy.

After 1867 the management of many government English schools was handed over to the missionary societies. Other schools were simply closed when missionary English schools existed in the vicinity. The government followed this policy without consideration of the religious feelings of the population.33 The measures of the Morgan Report provided no conscience clause that could exempt Buddhist or Tamil pupils from the compulsory attendance of religious instruction. Due to the government's gradual retreat from English education and the promotion of missionary English schools, everybody with a desire to learn English was exposed to the proselytising ambitions of the missionaries. Sumathipala quotes Ponnambalam Ramanathan who in 1884 presented a memorial of several Jaffna Hindus to the Legislative Council, in which the petitioners complained about the religious intolerance in the missionary schools:

[C]hildren who are obliged to go to these missionary schools are forced by the missionaries, under pain of fines and expulsion, to read the Bible whether they liked it or not [ ... ] Hindu boys who, for want of their own English schools, resort to the missionary schools, have learnt to make mental reservations and are getting skilled in the art of dodging. The holy ashes put on at home during worship are carefully rubbed off as they approach the Christian school and they affect the methods of Christian boys while at school. [ ... ] There is a great deal too much of hypocrisy in Jaffna in the matter of religion, owing the fact that the love of the missionaries for proselytes is as boundless as the love of the Jaffnese to obtain some knowledge of English at any cost. […] If there is no conscience clause in the grant-in-aid code, I think the sooner a clause of that kind is introduced the better it will be for religious freedom in Ceylon.34

While religious instruction was not a subject in government schools anymore, the private grant-receiving schools were free to teach the subject. Almost all of the grant-aided schools were under Christian management and, thus, held compulsory religious instruction lessons (mostly held in the first school hour). Throughout the nineteenth century, the pupils were compelled to attend these lessons. No conscience clause existed.

The government's gradual retreat from English education gained momentum, when the plantation economy experienced first signs of the coffee crisis in the late 1870s. Government coffers suffered from a lack of funds. Thus, the Legislative Council's Retrenchment Committee proposed in 1883 to hand over local Anglo-vernacular and English schools to the Municipal and Local Boards. Ordinance 33 of 1883 was passed and made provisions for the transfer of English and mixed schools located within the limits of municipalities to the local authorities. But only in Puttalam such a transfer was successful. Most other Municipal and Local Boards lacked the financial means to assume control over the government schools. The missionaries stepped in and took over the management of the schools. Therefore, 21 government English schools were either handed over to the missionary bodies or closed until the end of 1884.37 The Colombo Academy (renamed the Royal College in 1881) remained the only government English school within the boundaries of a municipality.38 The government's vernacular education policy was more successful. Between 1873 and 1900, the number of government vernacular schools increased from 241 to 484. Still the government was outperformed by the missionaries who increased the number of their schools from 237 to 1,186.39 Jayasuriya states that on several recorded occasions government vernacular schools were also handed over to the missionaries or closed, if a missionary school of the same type was near.40

The government relied heavily on the grant-in-aid system introduced by the Morgan Report and considered it a practicable way to outsource educational responsibility to the missionaries. The allocation of such grants was based on the principal of payment by results. Officials of the Department of Public Instruction conducted examinations in the schools. The results of these examinations decided whether a school was eligible for a grant and, if so, for what grant category. The grant in-aid system did not place any restriction on religious instruction in the grant-aided schools -- although examinations were conducted in secular subjects only. Grants were given in the categories A, B and (since 1872) C -- in descending order of the allocated sum. Grants for C schools were small and awarded only for three years. During that time the C school had to qualify for an A or B grant. The distinction in A, B and C schools was applied to every type of school. Among those types English schools received the highest grants, followed by Anglo-vernacular and, finally, vernacular schools.41

The working of the grant-in-aid system was tightly connected with the financial state of the colony. Initially comparatively generous grants were made. The coffee plantations' prosperity had reached new heights and the government coffers were filled up to the rim. The missionary societies seized the opportunity and most missionary schools applied for a grant. In 1870, the first year of the new scheme, 223 schools received a grant. Six year later the number of eligible schools had increased to 697.42

The government and the Department for Public Instruction were both pleased with the working of the grant-in-aid system from its very inception. More and more educational responsibility was passed to the private missionary bodies that competed fiercely for grants and constantly established more schools. The missionaries were the main beneficiaries of the system -- even though, in theory, all private schools (i. e. not just missionary schools) could apply for a government grant since the revisions of the Morgan Committee. Although the indigenous religious groups quickly realised the potential of the grant-in-aid system, they could not make full use of the scheme due to several hindrances. Unlike their Christian counterparts, the Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims had not participated in the field of education prior to the 1870s on any significant scale. The considerable number of Buddhist pansala schools had existed outside the official educational system of the island since the arrival of the British. The pansalas contributed to the spread of literacy in the vernacular and were very valuable for the villagers, but they worked on different principles than government or missionary schools. Therefore, they could not serve as a training ground in (Western) educational management. Apart from the Buddhist pansalas, the indigenous communities had little experience in the management of schools, although every now and then a local school was set up and run on private funds.

The indigenous religion groups' ambitions to secure government grants did not only suffer from their lack of experience in schools management. The often also lacked the money to set up schools in the first place. And when they managed to do so, they faced the fierce opposition of the missionary bodies, the partiality of the British officials and -- the most formidably -- provisions of the so-called Distance Rule as introduced in 1874. Thus, only four Buddhist and one Hindu school were registered for a grant in the year 1880 (ten years after the introduction of the revised scheme) -- as against a total of 833 grant-aided schools in that year.43

The missionary societies with their headquarters in Europe or America had much larger financial resources at their disposal than the local Buddhist or Hindu communities. This gave the missionaries a distinct advantage over their native competitors, as the initial investment to set up and run a school was considerable and grants were only given to schools already up and running. Furthermore, the opposition of the missionaries and their influence on the European officials often delayed or prevented the registration of Buddhist and Hindu schools for a grant. Jayasuriya gives several examples for this practice and both Jayasuriya and Sumathipala quote the Director of Public Instruction on one particular case in the Northern Province:

During the last two years some applications were considered for the registration of schools under Sivite [Hindu] managers. They were large schools, had existed for many years, and fulfilled every condition required by the existing regulations. The case of one of the schools was submitted to my particular attention by the Tamil members of the Legislative Council. The protests of one of the Managers against the registration of such schools has been of a very determined kind, and he directly claims for the Society he represents the 'exclusive possession' of the district in which his schools are situated. Indeed with reference to a school which had been in existence for nearly twenty years, he says,

'If it can be made plain that the school is really needed, the teacher should be required to accept Mission management as the sole condition to receiving government aid.'44

Only rarely did such cases reach the Director of Public Instruction -- and even then it seems that little has been done to keep the Christian missionaries from interfering. The school in the referred case did not receive the grant.45 Christian lobbying slowed down the development of native schools and, above all, increased the lead of the missionary societies in the educational field. And with the introduction of the Distance Rule in 1874 an additional and crucial advantage in the competition for grants was given to those bodies with a large number of already registered schools -- i.e. the Christian missionary societies. The new rule made provisions for the refusal of grants for schools established within three miles of an existing government or grant-in-aid school of the same type -- except in special circumstances.46 Taking into account that the missionary schools had right from the introduction of the grant-in-aid scheme seized the opportunity and established numerous schools, it becomes clear that such a rule prevented the registration of new schools in many localities. The existence of a government or missionary grant-aided school in a village (or in the vicinity thereof) made the allocation of a grant for another school in that area impossible. This served a severe blow to the Buddhist and Hindu schools that explicitly aimed at providing indigenous educational facilities as alternative to the already established missionary institutions. With 595 grant-in-aid schools in 1874 47 (and the number rapidly increasing) it was hard enough to find a suitable place for a school with no other grant-in-aid school already existent. In the important population centres, where numerous missionary schools competed for pupils, the registration of a grant-aided school was almost impossible. The working of the Distance Rule satisfied both the secular authorities (for financial considerations) and the Protestant missionaries (whose educational supremacy it safeguarded). The Distance Rule was, therefore, included in Bruce's Revised Code of 1880. And in 1891, the even more restrictive quarter-mile rule was introduced.

-- Ceylon's Department of Public Instruction, 1868 [Excerpt], From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880-1900: An Economic and Social History, by Roland Wenzlhuemer

WHEREAS the said theosophists, perceiving the need for the upliftment of the people’s self-esteem in collaboration with Most Ven. Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, Ven. Migettuwatte Gunananda, Anagarika Dharmapala and other Buddhists Leaders founded the Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society for the purpose of fostering education, traditional culture and national heritage and protecting Buddha Sasana and consequently the Society has managed as many as 420 public schools.

-- Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society, by Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society

Like a lone sentinel, the saffron robe clad image of this illustrious son of mother Lanka seems to be patiently watching what has become of his noble dreams today. Though thousands of people pass the image on Galle Road daily, only a handful of people of even the locality are aware of his great service today.

A hundred yards from the turnoff are a set of walled-in school buildings on either side of the road. When this school was opened in 1869 it was in a background of the British colonial rulers discouraging and stifling efforts of indigenous leaders and intellectuals to resurge their own cultural heritage and civilization, the preservation of their very birthright.

British policy

One has to go back to 1812, when Robert Brownrigg, the notorious British governor who was recalled to England in disgrace after his scorched earth suppression of the Kandyan peasantry’s rebellion of 1817-18, wrote to his superiors in England that it would be a useless exercise to open any more schools in this country as the local children do not come to these schools. They go to the Buddhist temples, sit under the Bo tree and learn under Buddhist monks who wield tremendous influence over laymen. Unless the strong bond between the Buddhist monks and the lay society was broken it would be useless to open any more schools in this colony, Brownrigg wrote to his government in August 1812. Thus did the work of "educating and converting the pagans" begin in a country that had a flowering literature, art, sculpture, architecture and the world’s most advanced irrigation systems and well planned cities with running water supplied via underground conduits.

In pursuance of Brownrigg’s policy of discouraging the Buddhist clergy from playing their traditional key role in education, more and more missionary schools were being opened up under the patronage of the British government and a number of laws were enacted to discourage the Buddhists. Dodanduwe Piyaratana Thera, the founder of Dodanduwa Piyaratana Vidyalaya started the Dharmarthasiddha Society with the express intent of starting Buddhist schools as far back as 1869, the year in which the school was opened.

Port of call

An inlet formed along an outcrop of rocks at Dodanduwa, adjacent to the Rathgama lagoon was a small port of call for sailing vessels in past centuries even before the Portuguese set foot in the country that had brought prosperity to the two villages. The fisher folk of Dodanduwa were famous for their salted fish, which found a ready market all along the western seaboard. Local, Indian and Maldivian sailing vessels called over at this port as well as at Beruwala, Weligama, Devinuwara, Colombo, Chilaw, Mannar and even as far away as Trincomalee and Batticaloa.

There was trade with vessels that came from Trichinapoly, Nagapattanam and Kaveripattanam and the goods that changed hands ranged from the famous salt fish of Dodanduwa to clay roof tiles, clay pottery, and handloom textiles. People of the area were prosperous and most fish caught in the locality were salted or sold fresh. When the sea became rough, they sailed to fish in the seas off the east coast during the South West Monsoon. The sailing craft were as large as 60 or 70 feet long, a veritable fishing and trading fleet sometimes drawn up on the beach after sailing like the wall of a fortress.

Religious resurgence

With the prosperity reached by the people religious resurgence and the penchant for learning among these enterprising people also grew. Dodanduwa port became the centre that helped to establish the Sri Kalyaniwansa Maha Nikaya sect of the Buddhist clergy that led to the national resurgence.

The Mahā Nikāya (literal translation: "great order") is one of the two principal monastic orders, or fraternities, of modern Thai and Cambodian Buddhism. The term is used to refer to any Theravada monks not within the Dhammayuttika Nikaya, the other principal monastic order. The Maha Nikaya is the largest order of Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and Cambodia, in Thailand taking up over 90% of the Buddhist monks in the country.

After the founding of the Dhammayuttika Nikāya by the then-monk Prince Mongkut in 1833, decades later all recognized monks not ordained in the Dhammayuttika order were considered to be part of the maha nikāya, the "great collection" of those outside the new Dhammayuttika fraternity. As such, most monks in Thailand belong to the Maha Nikāya more or less by default; the order itself did not originally establish any particular practices or views that characterized those adhering to its creed. There were in reality hundreds of different Nikayas throughout the Thai areas that were lumped together as the "Maha Nikāya".

In Cambodia, a similar situation exists. The Dhammayuttika Nikāya was supposedly imported from Thailand in 1855, and those monks remaining outside the Dhammayuttika order were recognized as being members of the Maha Nikāya (Khmer: មហានិកាយ Mohanikay). A separate supreme patriarch for the Dhammayuttika Nikāya was appointed by King Norodom. The previous national supreme patriarch then became the titular head of the Cambodian Maha Nikāya.

In Thailand, a single supreme patriarch is recognized as having authority over both the Maha Nikāya and the Dhammayuttika Nikāya. In recent years some Maha Nikāya monks have campaigned for the creation of a separate Maha Nikāya patriarch, as recent Thai supreme patriarchs have invariably been drawn from the royalty-supported Dhammayuttika Nikāya, despite Dhammayuttika Nikāya monks making up only six percent of the monks in Thailand.

-- Maha Nikaya, by Wikipedia

In 1808 the Most Ven Kathaluwe Gunaratana Tissa Nayake Thera and his lay followers set sail from Dodanduwa in a local vessel for Myanmar to bring the Upasampada, higher ordination from that country as Buddhism and ecclesiastical development under continuous onslaughts of the Portuguese, Dutch and later the British had continued to suffer and decline. There was an even earlier visit to Myanmar by the Ven Kapugama Dhammakkanda Thera from Dadalla, Ven Bopagoda Sirisumana Thera of Rathgama who also left by a sailing vessel from Dodanduwa in 1786. These devoted theras set up a vihara in Dodanduwa in 1802. Legend has it the theras, seeing a luxuriant ginger plant, when uprooting it found a ginger tuber the size of a parasol and decided to build their temple on that spot. Some years later a marble image of the Buddha was found at Kaveripattanam in India and the French Governor of the district, who was approached by the Ven Sasammatha Dhammasara Thera, chief incumbent of the temple at Dodanduwa, gifted the statue to the temple. A second image of the Buddha that was found at the same site that was smaller in size was offered to the temple by the residents of this Indian port town.

Of this temple’s past, history and legend is interwoven. Named Shailabimbaramaya, the two marble images of the Buddha can be seen in the temple today. More importantly, the valiant and tenacious efforts of the Buddhist clergy of the Southern Province, especially Rathgama and Dodanduwa is an epic forgotten by people whose pursuit of overtaking their neighbour has made most of them rats in a meaningless race.

National heritage

The school had a complete lab, one of the first labs in the Southern Province that was started by the Ven Dodanduwe Piyaratana Thera and fully equipped by Colonel Henry Steele Olcott himself after he visited the school in 1880. Today the lab lacks proper facilities and equipment and science education at the school has lagged behind other schools in the area.

The number of students on roll today is 191 with classes from grade one to eleven. Some classes have only seven or eight children. The principal, Ms. Y. Seelawathie says children of the locality go to other schools, as they are popular and that this school has been neglected for sometime, especially during the past decade. Some of the buildings have collapsed while most others are in a neglected state. The education department or the ministry are probably unaware of the historical significance of this school, which has been named a National Heritage by the former minister of Cultural Affairs Vijitha Herath very recently.

One wonders whether the president who is herself the Minister of Education is aware of the existence of this school as no educational dignitary or plenipotentiary has ever visited it or taken notice of it.

There are various Buddhist societies and organisations in the country like the ACBC [All Ceylon Buddhist Congress] and even political parties that claim to fight for the rights and privileges of the Buddhist society and religion but the first Sinhala Buddhist School has not received their attention for decades. In fairness to the Buddhist Theosophical Society, it has to be said that they thwarted a recent attempt of the Southern Provincial Council to convert the school to a temporary shelter for tsunami victims last year. The Theosophical society official objected to the school being used as a camp for tsunami displaced but a part of the school’s land has been given to an NGO that has been criticized in certain quarters as an anti-Buddhist organisation to put up tents for the displaced.

Best library

The school had one of the best libraries in the south that Col. Olcott and many other Buddhist leaders helped to develop but surreptitious hands had been at work and most of the invaluable books have gone missing. There is no librarian. One of the objects of historical value and significance, an 8mm film projector gifted by Col. Olcott to the school has been sold by the Education Department to a person of the area for 400 rupees. The department has acted under the Financial Regulations and had condemned this artefact as an "unserviceable item" and sold it to the highest bidder! Just how stupid could red tape really become?

Olcott

Col. Olcott visited the school and Sri Shailabimbarama Dodanduwa where the Piyaratana Nayake Thera lived. The thera advised Olcott to help open Buddhist schools, not in competition with the Christian missionary schools but to give an opportunity to rural Buddhists who could not get the recognition of the colonial authorities if they had received their education in the Buddhist temples or Pirivenas.

Col. Olcott took this advice, as he had known the thera with whom he had corresponded since 1878. Though many writers have written that Olcott's visit to Sri Lanka was inspired by learning about the religious debate at Panadura it is the correspondence he had with the Ven Piyaratana Nayake Thera that brought Olcott to our shores.

In the archives, Olcott's diary still exists. He has written that he came to this country from the port of Galle and visited the temple of Piyaratana Thera after addressing a gathering of about 2000 that came to Galle to greet him. He said the temple was one of the most well organised and orderly temples. He spent ten days at the temple discussing the future of Buddhist education in this country and formulating the concept of the Buddhist Theosophical Society (BTS) schools that changed the colonial education map of this country.

History sits like an unseen but ubiquitous reality here. Even the Tibetan born Ven S. Mahinda who adopted this country as his motherland and became the poet laureate of the freedom struggle was also ordained in the temple of Ven Dondaduwe Piyaratana Nayake Thera in 1911. At present, we have stepped into an era of spurning history, especially after 1977. When one visits the school one is really treading on hallowed ground, still held close to their hearts by persons of the locality.

The principal proudly shows the shrine room with a Buddha image completed recently by two well-wishers. This new shrine in spotless white is perhaps the only feature that has been added on by the present generation.

The promontory projecting into the lagoon from the adjoining Rathgama rises above the waters as one goes on a village road to the hamlet Moraththuduwa. Here atop its crest hiding under the lush canopy of areca, bamboo, jak, and coconut trees is a middle class home where a lone campaigner Amarajeeva de Silva Rajakaruna shows old documents, meticulously kept records of dates and events which he values as the most precious of all his worldly possessions. His father, octogenarian and retired principal D. D. de S. Rajakaruna, and his own father had been students of the Dondaduwa school. They have both campaigned for the revival of this school to its past glory.

However, has our nation been cured of the ailment of the open economy that disdained this country’s national heritage preferring to count dollars while the people were told to earn money, money and more money and make merry, even if you had to commit the vilest calumny on the sacred treasures of this nation?


A stamp released in honour of Rev Dodanduwa Sri Piyaratana Tissa Mahanayake Thero

source : The Island - 6th August, 2005

[admin]

Emile Senart [Emile Charles Marie Senart ]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

T. W. Rhys Davids’s interest in Pāli began while he was serving in the Ceylon Civil Service (1864–72). His association with Buddhism at this time was incidental—to learn Pāli he had to study with a bhikkhu. His first translation, typical of the historical bias of his time, was in numismatics and epigraphy, an outcome of his posting to the archaeologically rich area of Anuradhapura, and led in 1877 to his Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon, which contained the first attempt to date the death of the Buddha.9 He did not write on Buddhism until after his return to Britain, and a modest comment on how little he knew about Buddhism at that time, which is quoted by Ananda Wickremaratne, suggests that he was invited to do so because of popular interest in Buddhism.10 His first book, the highly influential Buddhism: A Sketch of the Life and Teachings of Gautama, the Buddha (1878), was compiled from the material then available in translation.11 This book established his reputation as a Buddhist scholar. It was followed by his translations Buddhist Birth Stories and Buddhist Suttas, both published in 1880.12 During the influential Hibbert Lectures of 1881, he announced the founding of the Pāli Text Society, confidently predicting the publication of the whole of the texts of the Sutta and Abhidhamma Pitakas in “no very distant period.”13 The inaugural committee of management included, among others willing to undertake translation, the Pāli scholars Victor Fausboll, Hermann Oldenberg, and Emile Senart. There was clearly a growing interest and activity in Pāli translation by this time. The formation of the Pāli Text Society institutionalized the study of Buddhism and the interpretation of it, which had begun much earlier. It is necessary therefore to look briefly at the earlier period.

-- Defining Modern Buddhism: Mr. and Mrs. Rhys Davids and the Pali Text Society, by Judith Snodgrass

Émile Senart
Born: Émile Charles Marie Senart, 26 March 1847, Reims
Died: 21 February 1928 (aged 80), Paris
Occupation: Indologist

Émile Charles Marie Senart (26 March 1847 – 21 February 1928) was a French Indologist.

Besides numerous epigraphic works, we owe him several translations in French of Buddhist and Hindu texts, including several Upaniṣad.

He was Paul Pelliot's professor at the Collège de France.

He was elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1882, president of the Société asiatique [Asiatic Society] from 1908 to 1928 ...

The Société Asiatique (Asiatic Society) is a French learned society dedicated to the study of Asia. It was founded in 1822 with the mission of developing and diffusing knowledge of Asia. Its boundaries of geographic interest are broad, ranging from the Maghreb to the Far East. The society publishes the Journal asiatique [1822-1936]. At present the society has about 700 members in France and abroad; its library contains over 90,000 volumes.

The establishment of the society was confirmed by royal ordinance on April 15, 1829. Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy was the first president.

Notable people

• Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat
• Jacques Bacot
• Jean Berlie
• Eugène Burnouf
• Jean-François Champollion
• Henri Cordier
• Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès
• Julius Klaproth
• Louis Finot
• Jean Leclant
• Sylvain Lévi
• Abdallah Marrash
• Gaston Maspero
• Paul Pelliot
• Joseph Toussaint Reinaud
• Ernest Renan
• Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin
• Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
• İbrahim Şinasi
• Charles Virolleaud

List of the presidents of the Société

• 1822–1829: Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
• 1829–1832: Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat
• 1832–1834: Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
• 1834–1847: Amédée Jaubert
• 1847–1867: Joseph Toussaint Reinaud
• 1867–1876: Julius von Mohl
• 1876–1878: Joseph Héliodore Garcin de Tassy
• 1878–1884: Adolphe Régnier
• 1884–1892: Ernest Renan
• 1892–1908: Barbier de Meynard
• 1908–1928: Émile Senart
• 1928–1935: Sylvain Lévi
• 1935–1945: Paul Pelliot
• 1946–1951: Jacques Bacot
• 1952–1964: Charles Virolleaud
• 1964–1969: George Coedès
• 1969–1974: René Labat
• 1974–1986: Claude Cahen
• 1987–1996: André Caquot
• 1996–2002: Daniel Gimaret
• 2002–present: Jean-Pierre Mahé

-- Société Asiatique [Asiatic Society], by Wikipedia

and founder of the "Association française des amis de l'Orient" in 1920.

Selected works

• 1875: Essai sur la légende du Bouddha - Paris.
• Les Inscriptions de Piyadasi - Paris
• 1881: Les Inscriptions de Piyadasi / 1 / Les quatorze édits.
• 1886: Les Inscriptions de Piyadasi / 2 / L.édits détachés. L'auteur et la langue des édits.
• 1882–1897: Le Mahāvastu: Sanskrit text. Published for the first time and accompanied by introductions and commentary by E. Sénart. - Paris : Imprimerie Nationale, 1882-1897, Volume 1/ 1882, Volume 2/ 1890, Volume 3/ 1897
• 1889: Gustave Garrez
• 1896: Les Castes dans l'Inde, les faits et le système - Paris (Caste in India. Translated by E. Denison Ross. London 1930)
• 1901: Text of Inscriptions discovered at the Niya Site, 1901 / Transcr. and edited by A. M. Boyer, E. J. Rapson and E. Senart. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1920 (Kharosthi Inscriptions discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in Chinese Turkestan ; 1)
• 1907: Origines Bouddhiques
• 1927: Text of Inscriptions discovered at the Niya, Endere, and Lou-lan Sites, 1906-7 / Auguste M. Boyer; Edward James Rapson; Émile Charles Marie Senart. - Oxford.
• 1930: Chāndogya Upaniṣad Translated and annotated by Émile Sénart, Société d'édition: Les Belles Lettres, Paris.

Sources

• This article contains text from a document on the La vie rémoise site.

External links

• Émile Sénard on Wikisource
• SENART Émile, Charles, Marie on Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
• Obituary on Persée

********************************

Obituary Notices: Emile Charles Marie Senart
by F.W. Thomas
The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
No. 3, pp. 751-760
July 1928

The greatest part of M. Senart’s productivity as a scholar was concerned with Buddhism. In 1871, at the age of 24, he made his debut, in the Journal Asiatique (vi. xvii., pp. 193-540), by a publication of Kaccayana’s Pali Grammar, sutras and commentary, a work of great difficulty; the translation and notes betrayed no signs of immaturity and manifested a familiarity with the Sanskrit grammarians, whose model Kaccayana had followed. Next, published likewise as a series of articles in the Journal Asiatique, 1873-5, and issued as a volume in 1875, came the celebrated Essai sur la legend du Buddha, a book which has always been provocative to the more literal Buddhologists. No one can doubt that the story of Buddha, largely miraculous, is also in part mythological. The speciality of M. Senart’s theory was that the person of Buddha had absorbed not merely isolated mythological factors, but a fairly compact body of conceptions, originally solar. The case would be parallel to a well-known illustration accompanying one of Thackeray’s essays and showing three designs: (1) Rex (an imposing royal costume, standing by itself), (2) Ludovicus (a mere man), and (3) Ludovicus Rex, the combined awe-inspiring figure. It seems rather clear that the idea of the cakravartin was pre-Buddhistic and ultimately solar: the events preceding the abandonment of home are at least highly poetical, the detailed incidents of the illumination and the defeat of Mara are surely mythology, and, even if the Bodhi-tree was an actuality, it was a conventional adjunct of ascetics, and, as such, symbolical too – though the symbolism need not have been solar. M. Senart may not have gone too far in suggesting a doubt whether Maya is a fictitious name for Buddha’s mother or even that of Suddhodana for his father; but clearly it was imprudent to doubt the existence of Kapilavastu. How much can be retained of the theory of the Visnuite or Krsnaite character of the legend it would not be easy to say. But, in fact, the legendary part of the Buddha story would hardly now be seriously considered by scholars, who are more concerned to discover what views were propounded by the person who figures in the Pali dialogues and why both he and Mahavira founded not schools, but sects.

In 1877, M. Senart published a short article, entitled Sur quelques termes buddhiques, wherein he took note of certain forms of words occurring in the Buddhist texts, such as upadisesa, which seemed to point to an earlier canonic dialect more developed (plus altere, plus prakritisant) than appears in their surroundings. His preoccupation with the dialects was also evidenced by a long and suggestive review of Cunningham, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, 1877. The articles containing his own edition of the Inscriptions de Piyadasi began to appear in 1880.1 The completed work (1881) was translated by Sir George Grierson in the Indian Antiquary (xviii, 1889-xxi, 1892). M. Senart was able in some instances to make use of new facsimiles furnished by Dr. Burgess. But the great advance in the interpretation was due mainly to his own insight and his familiarity with the Pali language and literature. The concluding chapters are devoted to a study of the date and chronology of the inscriptions and the general questions of Buddhist chronology so far as connected therewith; the author of the inscriptions, his faith and his measures; the language and the several dialects, whereof full grammatical sketches are given; the linguistic chronology of India and the interrelations between Sanskrit, Mixed Sanskrit, the Prakrits, and Pali. Almost all the conclusions at which M. Senart arrived (including his acceptance of the date A.D. 319 for the commencement of the Gupta era) still hold good. But there is one great matter which seems in his argument to retain some of its previous obscurity. He holds that the alphabets show by their inadequacy that they could not have been used for writing Sanskrit (or, we may add, Pali). The first Sanskrit to be written was the Mixed Sanskrit of certain inscriptions, which had been known as the Gatha dialect and for which M. Senart had himself previously proposed the name Buddhist Sanskrit. This ceased to exist at the moment when the philological exactitude of the old Brahman schools extended its influence. The Prakrits and the Pali also assumed a definite form when controlled by a similar influence. The process may have begun about A.D. 100 and have been completed before the Gupta period. The matter is certainly puzzling, and it is clear that the Asokan alphabets must have been developed in certain points before they could be fitted for the writing of Sanskrit. But the inference that at the time there was no written Sanskrit, and in fact no worldly Sanskrit at all, seems inadequately grounded. The influence of the learned language upon the popular speech did not commence with Panini: it must have begun from the moment when the vernacular began to diverge from the language of the texts (Brahmanas, Upanisads, and so forth). What Panini discriminated was the correct language of the sistas, the scholars. We know from the early references in the Chandogya-Upanisad and elsewhere that there were whole classes of writings of a worldly character, and these must have been composed in fairly popular speech. Thus in principle the Mixed Sanskrit must go back many centuries B.C., and we cannot doubt that stages of it existed at the time of Buddha and in that of Asoka. The character of the Buddhist Sanskrit was, of course, fully recognized by M. Senart, and his divergence from the view of Burnouf that it was a language of persons who, with inadequate competence, were trying to write the literary language is a little hard to seize. The Mixed Sanskrit is Sanskrit with faults, a variety of that “bad Sanskrit” which we find in Vedic Parisistas, manuals of crafts, arts, etc. Its only excuse for existence was its actual currency, and it was no doubt the spread of grammatical training that ultimately expelled it from all higher literature. To this extent we cannot but subscribe to M. Senart’s view. But, then, for the Mixed Sanskrit the Asokan alphabets are no less inadequate than for the scholarly form; so that we should have to deny that the Mixed Sanskrit itself was written prior to the use of double consonants, differentiation of the sibilants, the nasals and so forth. We must, it seems, stop short of this and hold (1) that writing was first employed in connection with popular speech, for business purposes, and so forth, (2) that the Sanskrit, like the Mixed Sanskrit, may at first have made shift with the imperfect alphabets as used in the Asoka inscriptions (possibly writing double consonants with viramas and so forth), (3) that the inscriptions themselves, being written in merely popular and official dialects, may have been content with alphabetic practice less developed than that which at the time was in actual use for literary purposes – this last proposition is in fact maintained by Buhler. M. Senart’s discrimination of the different dialects represented in the Edicts, his recognition of the Magadhi as official over an area wider than its currency and of its particular intrusions in the texts of the other dialects have been generally confirmed; and his detailed accounts of the features of the several dialects have been merely amplified in later works.

M. Senart’s study of the early inscriptions in the Brahmi and Kharosthi alphabets continued throughout his life as a scholar. New materials and new discoveries were regularly referred to him, and they gave occasion to a long series of articles, for the most part published under the running title Notes de’Epigraphie Indienne,2 always characterized by the most scrupulous examination of the copies and the most penetrating explanation of the texts. His editions of the Karle and Nasik inscriptions (Epigraphia Indica, vol. vii., pp. 47-74; viii, pp. 59-96) brought those texts up to the level of modern scholarship. When the time came for a republication of volume I of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, his preoccupations did not allow him to undertake the task, which was discharged in a thorough manner by that very sound, careful and fair-minded scholar, Professor Ernst Hultzsch. The last articles by M. Senart on these subjects were his discussion (1916) of the new Asoka edict found at Maski in Hyderabad and – in collaboration with the Abbe Boyer and Professor Rapson – an examination (1918) of a poem inscribed on a Kharosthi tablet from Chinese Turkestan.

We have still, however, to take account of an analogous task of great difficulty, wherein M. Senart collaborated with the same two scholars. The materials consisted of documents, chilefly wooden tablets, discovered by Sir A. Stein in the course of his three expeditions to Chinese Turkestan. The general features of the script and language, as well as some tentative transliterations and translations, were the subject of a communication by Professor Rapson to the Algiers Congress of 1905. But the developed form of the Kharosthi alphabet, including unprecedented combinations of signs, and the mixed character of the vocabulary, which comprises a large number of local proper names and titular designations, entailed a long period of joint manipulation: two fascicule, containing the bulk of the material, were published, under the title Kharosthi Inscriptions, in 1920 and 1927.

The Mahavastu is a Sanskrit Buddhist text, which with its apparatus criticus fills in M. Senart’s edition more than 1300 pages octavo. It is a work of great importance, belonging to the Vinaya of one of the old Buddhist sects, that of the Mahasanghikas. It is a mine of old Buddhist story, observation, reflections, and wit in unlaboured prose and flowing verse: a book which in another literature might be made a life’s study. Unfortunately, it is but a drop in the ocean of Buddhist literature, which we must somehow encompass as a whole if we are not to be engulfed in it. Still more unfortunately, perhaps, it is written in the Mixed Sanskrit, a text presenting at every step irregularities, and even regularities, which may have been imported into it at any stage in its long history. The MSS., of modern date and all from Nepal, have by their discrepancy involved the editor in an enormous labour of collation. If we had copies of older date or of different provenance (say from Central Asia), we should be confronted (as many analogies show) with divergences far more numerous and in many cases on a much larger scale. A definitive text is hardly to be hoped for. The difficulty, however, is in the main a matter only of grammar or language. M. Senart has given us an important canonical text of one of the most influential early sects. Its further study cannot fail to yield continual fruit, and M. Senart’s closely printed commentary of about 400 pages is itself a mine of new and valuable observations upon textual and linguistic matters and upon Buddhist thought and terminology. Still a different dialect appears in the MS. Dutreuil du Rhins, the Kharosthi Dhammapada, concerning which M. Senart read a paper before the Paris Congress of 1897, and which he edited in the Journal Asiatique.3 Among the papers of the ill-fated traveler some birch-bark fragments were noted by M. Sylvain Levi as inscribed in Kharosthi characters. The fragments were for the most part small, in many cases minute; but M. Senart had no difficulty in recognizing a version of the celebrated collection of moral and religious verses known in Pali under the title Dhammapada. The formidable task of decipherment was thus lightened, and M. Senart was able to find Pali equivalents for most of the verses and fragments. It was unfortunate that another part of the same MS. (the Ptrovsky fragments), which had found its way to St. Petersburg, was not fully available for incorporation. The MS. did not originate in Chinese Turkestan: it had been brought from noth-western India, and it furnished a new early Prakrit dialect, which has yet to be fully explored.

There remains for commemoration only one extensive work by M. Senart. This is his monograph on caste (Les Castes dans l’Inde, 1895, reprinted without change in 1927), a subject in regard to which the examination of prior views is almost more onerous than the direct study of the facts. M. Senart’s three chapters are devoted respectively to the present, the past, and the origins, including a criticism of the traditional Brahmanic theory and the conclusions of Nesfield, Ibbetson, and Risley. The main originalities of his own view are (1) the distinction between the original classes, varna, of Brahman, Ksatriya, Vaisya and Sudra, at first two “colours”, varna, namely Aryan and Sudra, and the specific endo-exogamic groups properly denoted by the word jati “caste”, (2) the tracing of the latter organizations to an Aryan source in a gentile constitution of society such as existed in early Greece and Rome. It must be admitted that for gentes in the required sense we do not find much evidence in early India (that is by no means conclusive) and that among the castes mentioned by Manu and other ancient writers (we need not take into account the castes of modern times, after a development of about 2,500 years) we find designations professional, genealogical, tribal, and local, but hardly any of a gentilician import. Also we ought to be able to point to Brahman and Ksatriya gentes: can this be done? Yet M. Senart’s view does account for two main features of caste, namely the endogamic principles and the rules as to common meals. It remains possible that a gentilician constitution of society did leave these features as a legacy to new divisions of very various origins, developing in the complex Indian people.

Besides the works which we have cited we owe to M. Senart a number of studies of less extent. Such are his striking little work on Buddhism and Yoga, his papers on the Abhisambuddha-gathas of the Pali Jataka, on the Vajrapani in early Buddhist art, on Rajas and the theory of the three Gunas in the Samkhya philosophy. In 1922 he published an elegant translation of the Bhagavad-gita. All his writings are distinguished by a refined linguistic sense and a clear unbiased judgment. There is also nothing second-hand or compilatory in his work; on the contrary, his tendency was always towards new and vital conceptions. Considering the combined brilliance and solidity of his work, it cannot be said that in the qualities of a scholar he was surpassed by an Indianist of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

It is well known that M. Senart possessed advantages of fortune which might have proved an obstacle to a strictly scholarly career. Fortunately science and letters can point to not a few instances of men of means who were not merely thinkers or amateurs, but specialist investigators whose work would not have been modified by being professional. M. Senart was always counted among the Indianist circle of the University of Paris, and not only of the Societe Asiatique (Asia Society), in which he was successively member of Council (1872), Vice-President (1890), and President (1908). After the death of M. Barth, to whom in 1914[4] he paid a touching tribute, he was, so to speak, the father of the Paris Indianists. In the Academie des Inscriptions he was the outstanding representative of oriental studies. In such matters as the foundation of the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, the Pelliot mission to Central Asia, the Commission Archeologique of the Academy his was usually the directing influence. When the time came for celebrating the centenary of the Societe Asiatique (Asia Society) the full burden of organization and leadership in the splendid succession of ceremonies and festivities recorded in the published record was unflinchingly borne by him. Nor could anything surpass the patience, the courtesy, and the distinguished eloquence and dignity with which at the age of 75 he carried out the whole programme.

From the time of the Paris Congress of 1897, M. Senart was regarded outside France as the leading French orientalist. He was a prominent figure in the gatherings at Rome (1899) and Algiers (1905). He was a member of the permanent international committee, and he also represented the Institute at the international conferences of Academies. In 1917, in order to meet the situation created by the war, and also in view of certain features of the pre-war Congresses, he made formal proposals, on behalf of the Societe Asiatique (Asia Society), providing for mutual privileges, annual gatherings, and joint enterprises. The agreement, to which also the American Oriental Society, the Senola Orientale of the University of Rome, and the Asiatic Society of Japan became parties, is fully recorded in this Journal (1918, pp. 186-97). The first Joint Session was held in London on September 3-6, 1919, and the proceedings are reported in the Journal for 1920, pp. 123-62. There were further meetings at Paris in 1920 and at Brussels in 1921. From the gathering in 1919 four new Orientalist societies directly or indirectly originated, namely in Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Sweden, of which the second, the Oostersch Genootschap in Nederland, has since held annual assemblies of a partly international character. In 1923 the centenary of the Royal Asiatic Society was honoured by M. Senart’s presence as a representative of France. When in 1926 the question of resuming the old series of international gatherings assumed a practicable aspect, M. Senart and his colleagues of the Societe Asiatique (Asia Society) were consenting parties in the negociations and approved the outcome. Shortly afterwards, in march, 1927, M. Senart’s eightieth birthday was made an occasion for messages of congratulation from friends and colleagues both in France and abroad. A critical illness prevented any formal presentation; but the messages did not fail to receive an individual and gracious acknowledgment. Ever scrupulous in the minor offices of social life, a punctual correspondent, a delightful host, and a loyal friend, he realized an ideal of urbane unselfishness, in which only the winning exterior disguised a renunciatory quality. His increasing frailty was naturally as perceptible to himself as to others; but he anticipated its denouement, which took place on February 21 of the present year, without either satisfaction or refret.

He was born at Rheims on March 26, 1847. His relations with the Societe Asiatique (Asia Society] have already been particularized. In 1882 he was elected a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He was also at various times chosen as a member of the Academies of Belgium, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, and Russia, of Berlin, Gottingen, and Munich, and an Honorary Member of numerous societies. In this country the Royal Asiatic Society paid him that tribute in 1892, and the India Society in 1922 elected him a Vice-President; in 1923 he received the Honorary Doctorate of the University of Oxford. The death of his wife evoked many expressions of sympathy from orientalists who had enjoyed her hospitality at Paris in 1897; it left M. Senart without descendants.’

_______________

Notes

1. Journal Asiatique, VII, XV, pp. 287-347-VIII, viii, pp. 384-478.

2. Journal Asiatique, VIII, ix (1888), pp. 498-504; xi (1888), pp. 504-33; xii (1888), pp. 311-30; xiii (1889), pp. 364-75; xv (1890), pp. 113-63; xix (1892), pp. 472-98; ix, iv (1894), pp. 332053, 504-78; vii (1906), pp. 132-6; xiii (1899), pp. 526-37; xv (1900), pp. 343-60; x, vii, pp. 132-6; xi, iv (1914), pp. 569-85; vii (1916), pp. 425-42; JRAS, 1900, pp. 335-41.

3. IX, xii (1898), pp. 192-308.

4. On the occasion of the presentation recorded in the then collected edition of M. Barth’s writings, pp. vii-xii.

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Eugène Burnouf
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

-- Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, by Eugene Burnouf, 1801-1852

-- Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, by Eugene Burnouf, 1801-1852 (Rough English Version)

-- Eugene Burnouf, by Wikipedia

Max Muller's first visit to Burnouf was paid on March 20, and was the beginning of a friendship to which he looked back with affectionate gratitude to the last year of his life.

Diary.

Translation.

'Went to Burnouf. Spiritual, amiable, thoroughly French. He received me in the most friendly way, talked a great deal, and all he said valuable, not on ordinary topics but on special. I managed better in French than I expected. "I am a Brahman, a Buddhist, a Zoroastrian; I hate the Jesuits " — that is the sort of man. I am looking forward to his lectures.'

Max Muller describes his teacher as

'Small, his face decidedly German, only lighted up with a constant sparkle which is distinctively French. I must have seemed very stupid to him when I tried to explain what I really wanted to do in Paris. He told me afterwards that he could not make me out at first. His lectures were on the Rig-veda, and opened a new world to me. He explained to us his own researches, he showed us new MSS. which he had received from India, in fact he did all he could to make us fellow workers.'...

It was the influence of Burnouf that decided him to take up the Hymns of the Rig-veda, with the great native commentary of Sayana, as his distinctive work. 'Either study Indian philosophy or study Indian religion and copy the Hymns and Sayana,' said Burnouf. To the youth of only twenty-one, knowing hardly half a dozen people, living alone up five flights of stairs, often not speaking to a soul for twenty-four hours round, life may well have seemed dreary; and yet he never for one moment really regretted the choice he had made...

-- The Life and Letters of The Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muller, Edited by His Wife [Georgina Adelaide Grenfell Muller]

Eugène Burnouf
Born: April 8, 1801, Paris, France
Died: May 28, 1852 (aged 51)
Occupation: Orientalist

Eugène Burnouf (French pronunciation: ​[øʒɛn byʁnuf]; April 8, 1801 – May 28, 1852) was a French scholar, an Indologist and orientalist. His notable works include a study of Sanskrit literature, translation of the Hindu text Bhagavata Purana and Buddhist text Lotus Sutra. He wrote an introductory text on Buddhism and also made significant contributions to the deciphering of Old Persian cuneiform.

Life

He was born in Paris. His father, Professor Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775–1844), was a classical scholar of high reputation, and the author, among other works, of an excellent translation of Tacitus (6 vols., 1827–1833). Eugène Burnouf published in 1826 an Essai sur le Pali ..., written in collaboration with Christian Lassen; and in the following year Observations grammaticales sur quelques passages de l'essai sur le Pali [Google translate: Essay on the Pali..., written in collaboration with Christian Lassen; and in the following year Grammatical observations on some passages from the essay on Pali.].[1]

The next great work he undertook was the deciphering of the Avesta manuscripts brought to France by Anquetil-Duperron. By his research a knowledge of the Avestan language was first brought into the scientific world of Europe. He caused the Vendidad Sade, to be lithographed with the utmost care from the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and published it in folio parts, 1829–1843.[1]

From 1833 to 1835 he published his Commentaire sur le Yaçna, l'un des livres liturgiques des Parses [Google translate: Commentary on the Yaçna, one of the liturgical books of the Parses.].[1]

At about the same time in his life, Eugène Burnouf made significant contributions to the deciphering of Old Persian cuneiform. Copies of cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis had been published by Carsten Niebuhr many years earlier in 1778 and some preliminary inferences had already been made by other scholars such as Georg Friedrich Grotefend about these Persian inscriptions. In 1836, Eugène Burnouf discovered that the first of the inscriptions contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. With this clue in his hand, he was able to identify and publish an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he had correctly deciphered.[2][3][4]

A month earlier, Burnouf's friend Professor Christian Lassen of Bonn, had also published a work on "The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis".[4][5] He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies, and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was in consequence fiercely attacked. However, whatever his obligations to Burnouf may have been, according to Sayce, Lassen's "contributions to the decipherment of the inscriptions were numerous and important."[3]

A year later in 1837, Henry Rawlinson had made a copy of the much longer Behistun inscriptions in Persia.

In London, [Reinhold] Rost met Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, and was elected, in December 1863, secretary to the Royal Asiatic Society, a post he held for six years.

Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet, GCB FRS (5 April 1810 – 5 March 1895) was a British East India Company army officer, politician and Orientalist, sometimes described as the Father of Assyriology. His son, also Henry, was to become a senior commander in the British Army during World War I...

Rawlinson was appointed political agent at Kandahar in 1840. In that capacity he served for three years, his political labours being considered as meritorious as was his gallantry during various engagements in the course of the Afghan War; for these he was rewarded by the distinction of Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1844.

Serendipitously, he became known personally to the governor-general, which resulted in his appointment as political agent in Ottoman Arabia. Thus he settled in Baghdad, where he devoted himself to cuneiform studies. He was now able, with considerable difficulty and at no small personal risk, to make a complete transcript of the Behistun inscription, which he was also successful in deciphering and interpreting. Having collected a large amount of invaluable information on this and kindred topics, in addition to much geographical knowledge gained in the prosecution of various explorations (including visits with Sir Austen Henry Layard to the ruins of Nineveh), he returned to England on leave of absence in 1849.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in February 1850 on account of being "The Discoverer of the key to the Ancient Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian Inscriptions in the Cuneiform character. The Author of various papers on the philology, antiquities, and Geography of Mesopotamia and Central Asia. Eminent as a Scholar".

Rawlinson remained at home for two years, published in 1851 his memoir on the Behistun inscription, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He disposed of his valuable collection of Babylonian, Sabaean, and Sassanian antiquities to the trustees of the British Museum, who also made him a considerable grant to enable him to carry on the Assyrian and Babylonian excavations initiated by Layard. During 1851 he returned to Baghdad. The excavations were performed by his direction with valuable results, among the most important being the discovery of material that contributed greatly to the final decipherment and interpretation of the cuneiform character. Rawlinson's greatest contribution to the deciphering of the cuneiform scripts was the discovery that individual signs had multiple readings depending on their context. While at the British Museum, Rawlinson worked with the younger George Smith.

An equestrian accident in 1855 hastened his determination to return to England, and in that year he resigned his post in the East India Company. On his return to England the distinction of Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath was conferred upon him, and he was appointed a crown director of the East India Company.

The remaining forty years of his life were full of activity—political, diplomatic, and scientific—and were spent mainly in London. In 1858 he was appointed a member of the first India Council, but resigned during 1859 on being sent to Persia as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. The latter post he held for only a year, owing to his dissatisfaction with circumstances concerning his official position there. Previously he had sat in Parliament as Member of Parliament (MP) for Reigate from February to September 1858; he was again MP for Frome, from 1865 to 1868. He was appointed to the Council of India again in 1868, and continued to serve upon it until his death. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar.

Rawlinson was one of the most important figures arguing that Britain must check Russian ambitions in South Asia. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar. He argued that Tsarist Russia would attack and absorb Khokand, Bokhara and Khiva (which they did – they are now parts of Uzbekistan) and warned they would invade Persia (present-day Iran) and Afghanistan as springboards to British India.

He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1876 till his death. He was created Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1889, and a Baronet in 1891; was president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1874 to 1875, and of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1869 to 1871 and 1878 to 1881; and received honorary degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

-- Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet, by Wikipedia

Through Rawlinson he became on 1 July 1869 librarian at the India Office, on the retirement of FitzEdward Hall, and imposed order on its manuscripts.

-- Reinhold Rost, by Wikipedia

Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522 BC–486 BC), the inscriptions consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. Rawlinson sent a translation of the opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before this paper was published, however, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him, prompting a series of revisions and a delay in publication. In 1847 the first part of Rawlinson's Memoir was published, followed by the second part in 1849.[6] The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts was virtually accomplished.[3]

Eugène Burnouf received many Sanskrit texts from Indologist and anthropologist Brian Houghton Hodgson.[7] He published the Sanskrit text and French translation of the Bhagavata Purana ou histoire poétique de Krichna [Google translate: Bhagavata Purana or poetic story of Krichna] in three folio volumes (1840–1847). His last works were Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien [Google translate: Introduction to the history of Indian Buddhism] (1844), and a translation of Le lotus de la bonne loi (The Lotus Sutra, 1852).[1][8] According to Jonathan Silk, Burnouf can be regarded as "the founding father of modern Buddhist scientific studies."[9]

He had been for twenty years a member of the Academie des Inscriptions and professor of Sanskrit in the Collège de France. "Introduction à l'Histoire du Bouddhisme Indien" [Google translate: Introduction to the history of Indian Buddhism] [1] is recognized as an introduction to Buddhist metaphysics which influenced many French occultists in the nineteenth century for whom indianism and Sanskrit texts were a source of inspiration.

See a notice of Burnouf's works by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, prefixed to the second edition (1876) of the Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien; also Naudet, Notice historique sur MM. Burnouf, père et fils, in Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions [Google translate: Historical notice on MM. Burnouf, father and son, in Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions.]. A list of his valuable contributions to the Journal asiatique and of his manuscript writings, is given in the appendix to the Choix de lettres d'Eugène Burnouf [Google translate: Choice of letters by Eugène Burnouf] (1891).[1]

His cousin Emile-Louis Burnouf (1821–1907) continued his work on Sanskrit language.

Works

• Essai sur le Pali (1826)
• Vendidad Sade, l'un des livres de Zoroastre (1829–1843)
• Commentaire sur le Yaçna, l'un des livres liturgiques des Parses (1833–1835)[1]
• Mémoire sur les inscriptions cunéiformes (1838)
• Bhâgavata Purâna ou histoire poétique de Krichna (3 volumes, 1840–1847)[1]
• Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien (1844 ; 1876)[1]
• Le Lotus de la bonne loi,[1] traduit du sanscrit, accompagné d'un commentaire et de vingt et un mémoires relatifs au buddhisme (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1852). Reprint: Librairie d'Amérique et d'Orient A. Maisonneuve, Paris, 1973.
• Eugène Burnouf (in French) .

See also

• L'Inde française
• List of works by Eugène Guillaume

Notes

1. Chisholm 1911, p. 855.
2. Burnouf, Eugène (1836). Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions Cunéiformes trouvées près d'Hamadan et qui font partie des papiers du Dr. Schulz [Memoir on two cuneiform inscriptions [that were] found near Hamadan and that Sayce, Rev. A. H., Professor of Assyriology, Oxford, "The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions", Second Edition-revised, 1908, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, Brighton, New York; at pp 9–16 N Prichard, James Cowles, "Researches Into the Physical History of Mankind", 3rd Ed., Vol IV, 1844, Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, London, at pages 30-31
5. Lassen, Christian (1836). Die Altpersischen Keil-Inschriften von Persepolis. Entzifferung des Alphabets und Erklärung des Inhalts [The Old-Persian cuneiform inscriptions of Persepolis. Decipherment of the alphabet and explanation of its content.] (in German). Bonn, (Germany): Eduard Weber.
6. Rawlinson Henry 1847 "The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun, decyphered and translated; with a Memoir on Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions in general, and on that of Behistun in Particular", The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol X. It seems that various parts of this paper formed Vol X of this journal. The final part III comprised chapters IV (Analysis of the Persian Inscriptions of Behistunand) and V (Copies and Translations of the Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis, Hamadan, and Van), pp. 187-349.
7. Davidson, Ronald M. (2008). "Studies in Dhāraṇī Literature I: Revisiting the Meaning of the Term Dhāraṇī". Journal of Indian Philosophy. Springer Nature. 37 (2): 97–147. doi:10.1007/s10781-008-9054-8.
8. Akira Yuyama (2000), Eugene Burnouf: The Background to his Research into the Lotus Sutra, Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica, Vol. III, The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Tokyo 1998, pp. 61-77. ISBN 4-9980622-2-0
9. Silk, Jonathan (2012). Review: "A Missed Opportunity: Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism by Eugene Burnouf. Translated by Katia Buffetrille and Donald Lopez. University of Chicago Press 2010." History of Religions 51 (3), 262

References

• Delisle, Laure Burnouf: Choix de lettres d'Eugene Burnouf. Suivi d'une bibliographie, Paris: H. Champion (1891) Internet Archive
• Burnouf, Eugène (trad.): Le lotus de la bonne loi traduit du sanscrit, accompagné d'un commentaire et de vingt et un mémoires relatifs au buddhisme. Paris : Maisonneuve frères 1925. Internet Archive (PDF 34,9 MB)
• Burnouf, Eugène: Legends of Indian Buddhism; New York, Dutton 1911. Internet Archive
• Burnouf, Eugène: Introduction à l'histoire du buddhisme indien, Paris: Imprimerie royale1844. Internet Archive

Attribution:

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Burnouf, Eugène". Encyclopædia Britannica. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 885.

External links

• Media related to Eugène_Burnouf at Wikimedia Commons
• Notice sur les travaux de M. Eugène Burnouf (in French).

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Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

Rhys Davids was home schooled by her father and then attended University College, London studying philosophy, psychology, and economics (PPE). She completed her BA in 1886 and an MA in philosophy in 1889. During her time at University College, she won both the John Stuart Mill Scholarship and the Joseph Hume Scholarship. It was her psychology tutor George Croom Robertson who "sent her to Professor Rhys Davids",[5] her future husband, to further her interest in Indian philosophy. She also studied Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy with Reinhold Rost.

In London, Rost met Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, and was elected, in December 1863, secretary to the Royal Asiatic Society, a post he held for six years.

Through Rawlinson he became on 1 July 1869 librarian at the India Office, on the retirement of FitzEdward Hall, and imposed order on its manuscripts.

He secured for students free admission to the library. He retired in 1893 after 24 years of service at the age of 70. His successor as head librarian of the India Office Library became the Orientalist and Sanskritist Charles Henry Tawney (1837-1922).

Rost gained many distinctions and awards. He was created Hon. LL.D. of Edinburgh in 1877, and a Companion of the Indian Empire in 1888. He died at Canterbury on 7 February 1896.[1]

-- Reinhold Rost, by Wikiedia

-- Caroline Rhys Davids, by Wikipedia

Sir Henry Rawlinson GCB FRS
President of the Royal Geographical Society
In office: 1871–1873; 1874–1876
Preceded by: Sir Roderick Murchison
Succeeded by: Sir Henry Frere
Member of Parliament for Frome
In office: 1865 – 1868
Preceded by: Lord Edward Thynne
Succeeded by: Thomas Hughes
Member of Parliament for Reigate
In office: February – October 1858
Preceded by: William Hackblock
Succeeded by: William Monson
Personal details
Born: Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 5 April 1810, Chadlington, England
Died: 5 March 1895 (aged 84), London, Middlesex, England
Resting place: Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey
Political party: Liberal Party
Relatives: George Rawlinson (brother)
Employer: British East India Company
Awards: Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal (1840); Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (1889)
Military service
Allegiance: United Kingdom
Branch: British Army
Rank: Major-general
Wars: First Anglo-Afghan War

Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet, GCB FRS (5 April 1810 – 5 March 1895) was a British East India Company army officer, politician and Orientalist, sometimes described as the Father of Assyriology. His son, also Henry, was to become a senior commander in the British Army during World War I.

Early life and army service

Rawlinson was born on 5 April 1810, at the place now known as Chadlington, Oxfordshire, England.[1] He was the second son of Abram Tyack Rawlinson, and elder brother of the historian George Rawlinson. In 1827, having become proficient in the Persian language, he was sent to Persia in company with other British officers to drill and reorganize the Shah's troops. Disagreements between the Persian court and the British government ended in the departure of the British officers.

Rawlinson began to study Persian inscriptions, more particularly those in the cuneiform character, which had only been partially deciphered by Grotefend and Saint-Martin. From 1836 he was in the vicinity of the great cuneiform inscription at Behistun, near the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, for two years. He was the first Westerner to transcribe the Old Persian portion of the trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (a later form of Akkadian) written by Darius the Great sometime between his coronation as king of the Persian Empire in the summer of 522 BC and his death in autumn of 486 BC.

Political career

Rawlinson was appointed political agent at Kandahar in 1840. In that capacity he served for three years, his political labours being considered as meritorious as was his gallantry during various engagements in the course of the Afghan War; for these he was rewarded by the distinction of Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1844.

Serendipitously, he became known personally to the governor-general, which resulted in his appointment as political agent in Ottoman Arabia. Thus he settled in Baghdad, where he devoted himself to cuneiform studies. He was now able, with considerable difficulty and at no small personal risk, to make a complete transcript of the Behistun inscription, which he was also successful in deciphering and interpreting. Having collected a large amount of invaluable information on this and kindred topics, in addition to much geographical knowledge gained in the prosecution of various explorations (including visits with Sir Austen Henry Layard to the ruins of Nineveh), he returned to England on leave of absence in 1849.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in February 1850 on account of being "The Discoverer of the key to the Ancient Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian Inscriptions in the Cuneiform character. The Author of various papers on the philology, antiquities, and Geography of Mesopotamia and Central Asia. Eminent as a Scholar".[2]

Rawlinson remained at home for two years, published in 1851 his memoir on the Behistun inscription, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He disposed of his valuable collection of Babylonian, Sabaean, and Sassanian antiquities to the trustees of the British Museum, who also made him a considerable grant to enable him to carry on the Assyrian and Babylonian excavations initiated by Layard. During 1851 he returned to Baghdad. The excavations were performed by his direction with valuable results, among the most important being the discovery of material that contributed greatly to the final decipherment and interpretation of the cuneiform character. Rawlinson's greatest contribution to the deciphering of the cuneiform scripts was the discovery that individual signs had multiple readings depending on their context.[3] While at the British Museum, Rawlinson worked with the younger George Smith.

An equestrian accident in 1855 hastened his determination to return to England, and in that year he resigned his post in the East India Company. On his return to England the distinction of Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath was conferred upon him, and he was appointed a crown director of the East India Company.

The remaining forty years of his life were full of activity—political, diplomatic, and scientific—and were spent mainly in London. In 1858 he was appointed a member of the first India Council, but resigned during 1859 on being sent to Persia as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. The latter post he held for only a year, owing to his dissatisfaction with circumstances concerning his official position there. Previously he had sat in Parliament as Member of Parliament (MP) for Reigate from February to September 1858; he was again MP for Frome, from 1865 to 1868. He was appointed to the Council of India again in 1868, and continued to serve upon it until his death. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar.

Attitudes concerning Russia


"Our Eastern Policy", a caricature by "Spy", published in Vanity Fair, July 1873

Rawlinson was one of the most important figures arguing that Britain must check Russian ambitions in South Asia. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar. He argued that Tsarist Russia would attack and absorb Khokand, Bokhara and Khiva (which they did – they are now parts of Uzbekistan) and warned they would invade Persia (present-day Iran) and Afghanistan as springboards to British India.[3]

Later life

He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1876 till his death. He was created Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1889, and a Baronet in 1891; was president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1874 to 1875, and of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1869 to 1871 and 1878 to 1881; and received honorary degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

He married Louisa Caroline Harcourt Seymour, daughter of Jane (née Hopkinson) and Henry Seymour, on 2 September 1862, with whom he had two sons: Henry and Alfred. He was widowed on 31 October 1889 and died in London of influenza six years later. He is buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

Published works


Rawlinson's grave at Brookwood Cemetery

Rawlinson's published works include four volumes of cuneiform inscriptions, published under his direction between 1870 and 1884 by the trustees of the British Museum; The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun (1846–1851) and Outline of the History of Assyria (1852), both reprinted from the Asiatic Society's journals; A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria (1850); Notes on the Early History of Babylonia (1854); and England and Russia in the East (1875). He also made a variety of minor contributions to the publications of learned societies. He contributed articles on Baghdad, the Euphrates and Kurdistan to the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, together with several other articles dealing with the East; and he assisted in editing a translation of The Histories of Herodotus by his brother, Canon George Rawlinson.

Works

• Rawlinson, H. C. (1848). "The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun, Decyphered and Translated; With a Memoir on Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions in General, and on That of Behistun in Particular". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 10: i–349. ISSN 0035-869X. JSTOR 25581217.

References

Footnotes

1. Goldsmid, Frederic J. (1895). "Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Bart., G. C. B., etc". The Geographical Journal. 5 (5): 490–497. JSTOR 1773861.
2. "Library and Archive Catalogue". The Royal Society. Retrieved 4 October 2010.
3. Meyer, Karl Ernest; Brysac, Shareen Blair (1999). Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. New York: Counterpoint. p. 154. ISBN 978-1-58243-028-7.

Bibliography

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke". Encyclopædia Britannica. 22 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 928–929.
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Sir Henry Rawlinson
• Adkins, Lesley (2003). Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-00-712899-0.
• Rawlinson, George (1898). A Memoir of Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. London: Longmans, Green and Co – via Internet Archive.

External links

• Media related to Henry Rawlinson (Sir), 1st Baronet at Wikimedia Commons

Further reading

• Adkins, Lesley (2003). Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon. Thomas Dunns Books. pp. 440+. ISBN 9781466838383.
• Rawlinson, Henry (1841). The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun, Deciphered... Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 10. pp. 400+ – via Internet Archive.

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Charles Henry Tawney
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

Charles Henry Tawney
Born: 1837
Died: 1922
Occupation: Indologist, librarian

Charles Henry Tawney CIE (1837–1922[1][2]) was an English educator and scholar, primarily known for his translations of Sanskrit classics into English. He was fluent in German, Latin, and Greek; and in India also acquired Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, and Persian.[3]

Biography

Tawney was the son of Rev. Richard Tawney, and educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge; where he was a Cambridge Apostle and worked as a Fellow and Tutor for 4 years, until he moved to India for health reasons. He married Constance Catharine Fox in 1867 and had a large family.[3] One of his children, born 30 November 1880 in Calcutta, was Richard Henry or R. H. Tawney. From 1865 to his retirement in 1892 he held various educational offices, most significantly Principal of Presidency College for much of the period of 1875-1892.[3] His translation of Kathasaritsagara was printed by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in a small series called Bibliotheca Indica between 1880 and 1884.

After retirement, Tawney was made Librarian of the India Office.

Translations from Sanskrit

Tawney translated the Mālavikāgnimitra of Kālidāsa whose first edition was published in 1875 and second edition in 1891.[4]

His other works include:

• Bhavabhūti: Uttara-rāma-carita (1874) — a play
• Two Centuries of Bhartṛihari (1877) — two collections of ethical and philosophico-religious stanzas (online)
• Somadeva: Kathā Sarit Sāgara (1880-1884) — the massive collection of legends and tales (Vol I online) (Vol II online)
• Kathākoça (1895) — Jain stories (online)
• Merutunga: Prabandhacintāmaṇi (1899-1901) — Jain stories (online)

Notes

1. Thomas, F. W. (January 1923). "Charles Henry Tawney, M.A., C.I.E.". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1): 152–154. JSTOR 25210014.
2. "C. H. Tawney". Folklore. 33 (3): 334. September 30, 1922. JSTOR 1256118.
3. Penzer 1924, pp. vii-x
4. Schuyler, Jr., Montgomery (1902). "Bibliography of Kālidāsa's Mālavikāgnimitra and Vikramorvaçī". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 23: 93–101. doi:10.2307/592384. JSTOR 592384.

References

• Penzer, N. M. (1924), "Charles Henry Tawney", The Ocean of Story, being C.H. Tawney's Translation of Somadeva's Katha Sarit Sagara, I, London: Chas. J. Sawyer

External links

Charles Henry Tawneyat Wikipedia's sister projects

• Texts from Wikisource
• Online HTML ebook of The Ocean of Story (kathasaritsagara), volume 1-9, proofread, including thousands of notes and extra appendixes.
• Works by Charles Henry Tawney at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Charles Henry Tawney at Internet Archive

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Franz Bopp
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20


Franz Bopp
Born: 14 September 1791, Mainz, Electorate of Mainz
Died: 23 October 1867 (aged 76), Berlin, Province of Brandenburg
School: Romantic linguistics[1]
Institutions: University of Berlin
Notable students: Wilhelm Dilthey
Main interests: Linguistics
Notable ideas: Comparative linguistics
Influences: Pāṇini, Friedrich Schlegel
Influenced: Max Müller; Michel Bréal; August Schleicher[2]

Franz Bopp (German: [ˈfʁants ˈbɔp]; 14 September 1791 – 23 October 1867)[a] was a German linguist known for extensive and pioneering comparative work on Indo-European languages.

Early life

Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. (Windischmann, along with Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and the brothers Schlegel, expressed great enthusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy.) Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Speech and Wisdom of the Indians, Heidelberg, 1808), had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, and stimulated Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus.[4]

Career

In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit. There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (his primary instructor),...

[Antoine-Léonard de Chézy] was born at Neuilly. His father, Antoine de Chézy (1718–1798), was an engineer who finally became director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

École des Ponts ParisTech (originally called École nationale des ponts et chaussées or ENPC, also nicknamed Ponts) is a university-level institution of higher education and research in the field of science, engineering and technology. Founded in 1747 by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, it is one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious French Grandes Écoles...

Following the creation of the Corps of Bridges and Roads in 1716, the King's Council decided in 1747 to found a specific training course for the state's engineers, as École royale des ponts et chaussées. In 1775, the school took its current name as École nationale des ponts et chaussées, by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, in a moment when the state decided to set up a progressive and efficient control of the building of roads, bridges and canals, and in the training of civil engineers.

The school's first director, from 1747 until 1794, was Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, engineer, civil service administrator and a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Without lecturer, fifty students (among whom Lebon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Pierre-Simon Girard, Riche de Prony, Méchain and Brémontier), initially taught themselves geometry, algebra, mechanics and hydraulics. Visits of building sites, cooperations with scientists and engineers and participation to the drawing of the map of the kingdom used to complete their training, which was usually four to twelve years long.

During the First French Empire run by Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814, a number of members of the Corps of Bridges and Roads (including Barré de Saint-Venant, Belgrand, Biot, Cauchy, Coriolis, Dupuit, Fresnel, Gay-Lussac, Navier, Vicat) took part in the reconstruction of the French road network that had not been maintained during the Revolution, and in large infrastructural developments, notably hydraulic projects. Under the orders of the emperor, French scientist Gaspard Riche de Prony, second director of the school from 1798 to 1839, adapts the education provided by the school in order to improve the training of future civil engineers, whose purpose is to rebuild the major infrastructures of the country: roads, bridges, but also administrative buildings, barracks and fortifications. Prony is now considered as a historical and influential figure of the school. During the twenty years that followed the First Empire, the experience of the faculty and the alumni involved in the reconstruction strongly influenced its training methods and internal organisation. In 1831, the school opens its first laboratory, which aims at concentrating the talents and experiences of the country's best civil engineers. The school also gradually becomes a place of reflection and debates for urban planning.

As a new step in the evolution of the school, the decree of 1851 insists on the organisation of the courses, the writing of an annual schedule, the quality of the faculty, and the control of the students’ works. For the first time in its history, the school opens its doors to a larger public. At this time, in France, the remarkable development of transports, roads, bridges and canals is strongly influenced by engineers from the school (Becquerel, Bienvenüe, Caquot, Carnot, Colson, Coyne, Freyssinet, Résal, Séjourné), who deeply modernised the country by creating the large traffic networks, admired in several European countries.

-- École des ponts ParisTech, by Wikipedia

The son was intended for his father's profession; but in 1799 he obtained a post in the oriental manuscripts department of the national library. In about 1803, he began studying Sanskrit, and although he possessed no grammar or dictionary, he succeeded in acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to compose poetry in it.

In Paris sometime between 1800 and 1805, Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea introduced him to the Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, called Hermina or Hermine, who, extremely unusually for the time, was a very young divorcée who had come to Paris to be a correspondent for German newspapers.

Helmina von Chézy (26 January 1783 – 28 February 1856), née Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, was a German journalist, poet and playwright. She is known for writing the libretto for Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe (1823) and the play Rosamunde, for which Franz Schubert composed incidental music.

Helmina was born in Berlin, the daughter of Prussian officer Carl Friedrich von Klencke and his wife Caroline Louise von Klencke (1754–1802), daughter of Anna Louisa Karsch and herself a poet. The marriage of her parents had already broken up at her birth and she was partly raised by her grandmother. She started writing at the age of 14.

Married the first time in 1799, she divorced the next year and upon the death of her mother moved to Paris, where she worked as a correspondent for several German papers. From 1803 to 1807 she edited her own Französische Miszellen ("French Miscellanea") journal, commenting on political issues, which earned her trouble with the ubiquitous censors.

In Paris she befriended Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea, who introduced her to the French orientalist Antoine-Léonard de Chézy. In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the later author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. In 1810, together with Adelbert von Chamisso, she translated several of Friedrich Schlegel's lectures from French into German. They had a short romantic fling, followed by another extramarital affair of Helmina with the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, probably the father of another son who died shortly after his birth in 1811.

As her second marriage too turned out to be an unhappy one, Helmina finally parted from her husband in 1810. She returned to Germany, where she alternately lived in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Aschaffenburg and Amorbach. In 1812 she settled in Darmstadt. She witnessed the German campaign of the Napoleonic Wars as a military hospital nurse in Cologne and Namur. After she had openly criticised the miserable conditions in the field, she was accused of libel, but was acquitted by the Berlin Kammergericht court under presiding judge E. T. A. Hoffmann.

From 1817 she lived in Dresden, where she wrote the libretto of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe. Weber appreciated her writing but disliked her unbound ambition, speaking of her as a "suave poetess but unbearable woman". Several of her Romantic poems were set to music and Franz Schubert wrote incidental music for her play Rosamunde, which however flopped when it premiered in 1823 at the Vienna Theater an der Wien. Living in Vienna from 1823, she again became politically involved, calling attention to the inhumane working conditions at the saltworks in the Austrian Salzkammergut region. She met Beethoven who was one of her heroes growing up and became good friends with Beethoven and attended his funeral in 1827

--Helmina von Chézy, by Wikipedia

In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. However, the marriage was ultimately not a success, and the couple parted, although did not divorce, in 1810. De Chézy continued to make annual payments for her support until his death.

He was the first professor of Sanskrit appointed in the Collège de France (1815), where his pupils included Alexandre Langlois, Auguste-Louis-Armand Loiseleur-Deslongchamps and especially Eugène Burnouf, who would become his successor at the Collège on his death in 1832.

He was a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions.

-- Antoine-Léonard de Chézy, by Wikipedia

Silvestre de Sacy,...

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (French: [sasi]; 21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family...

In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department.

The Cour des monnaies (French pronunciation: ​[kuʁ de mɔnɛ], Currency Court) was one of the sovereign courts of Ancien Régime France. It was set up in 1552. It and the other Ancien Régime tribunals were suppressed in 1791 after the French Revolution.

The regulation of coin-making was royal regulation par excellence and very soon became the object of strict surveillance and dedicated judicial institutions. Monetary crimes were particularly severely punished, and coin clipping and counterfeiting could be punishable by death. At first monetary justice was exercised by généraux des monnaies, but in 1346 this passed to a dedicated Chambre des monnaies, set up in 1358 at the Palais de la Cité in buildings adjoining the Chambre des comptes. Appeals against sentences passed in the Chambre des monnaies were taken to the Parlement until January 1552, when the Chambre was turned into a sovereign court called the Cour des monnaies. The pioneering historian of the French language and medieval French literature, Claude Fauchet, served as President of the Cour des monnaies from 1581-1599.

-- Cour des monnaies, by Wikipedia

Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes)...

In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.

He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was created a baron of the French Empire by Napoleon in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, be became a peer of France and regularly spoke in the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des Pairs). In 1815 he became rector of the University of Paris, and after the Second Restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Rémusat, he was joint founder of the Société asiatique, and was inspector of oriental typefaces at the Imprimerie nationale. In 1821 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Silvestre de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription.

From 1807 to 1809, Sacy was also a teacher of Jean-François Champollion, whom he encouraged in his research.

But later on, the relationship between the master and student became chilly. In no small measure, Champollion's Napoleonic sympathies were problematic for Sacy, who was decidedly Royalist in his political sympathies.

-- Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, by Wikipedia

Louis Mathieu Langlès, and, above all Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), cousin of the American statesman of the same name, who had acquired an acquaintance with Sanskrit when in India and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial Library.[4]

In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly brought from India by Jean François Pons in the early 18th century), but also to the Sanskrit books that had been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses. He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration.

The first paper from his years of study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of Über das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic), to which Windischmann contributed a preface. In this first book, Bopp entered at once the path on which he would focus the philological researches of his whole subsequent life. His task was not to point out the similarity of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin or German, for previous scholars had long established that, but he aimed to trace the postulated common origin of the languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition. This was something no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared.[4]

After a brief sojourn in Germany, Bopp travelled to London where he made the acquaintance of Sir Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. He also became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James's, to whom he taught Sanskrit. He brought out, in the Annals of Oriental Literature (London, 1820), an essay entitled "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages" in which he extended to all parts of grammar what he had done in his first book for the verb alone. He had previously published a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti (London, 1819), the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata, Indralokâgama, and three others (Berlin, 1824); Diluvium, and three others (Berlin, 1829); a new edition of Nala (Berlin, 1832) followed in due course, all of which, with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita (1823), proved excellent aids in initiating the early student into the reading of Sanskrit texts. On the publication, in Calcutta, of the whole Mahabharata, Bopp discontinued editing Sanskrit texts and confined himself thenceforth exclusively to grammatical investigations.[4]

After a short residence at Göttingen, Bopp gained, on the recommendation of Humboldt, appointment to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Berlin in 1821, which he occupied for the rest of his life. He also became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy the following year.[6]

In 1827, he published his Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskritsprache (Detailed System of the Sanskrit Language), on which he had worked since 1821. Bopp started work on a new edition in Latin, for the following year, completed in 1832; a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin Glossary (1830), in which, more especially in the second and third editions (1847 and 1868–71), he also took account of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centered on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts at considerable intervals (Berlin, 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849, 1852), under the title Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend [Avestan], Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Gothic and German).[7]

How carefully Bopp matured this work emerges from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy (1824–1831), which preceded it.[7] They bear the general title Vergleichende Zergliederung des Sanskrits und der mit ihm verwandten Sprachen (Comparative Analysis of Sanskrit and its related Languages).[8] Two other essays (on the Numerals, 1835) followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. Old Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. E. B. Eastwick translated the work into English in 1845. A second German edition, thoroughly revised (1856–1861), also covered Old Armenian.[7]

In his Comparative Grammar Bopp set himself a threefold task:

1. to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their inter-comparison.
2. to trace their phonetic laws.
3. to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms.

The first and second points remained dependent upon the third. As Bopp based his research on the best available sources and incorporated every new item of information that came to light, his work continued to widen and deepen in the making, as can be witnessed from his monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages (1836), on the Celtic languages (1839), on the Old Prussian (1853) and Albanian languages (Über das Albanesische in seinen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen, Vienna, 1854), on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (1854), on the relationship of the Malayo-Polynesian to the Indo-European languages (1840), and on the Caucasian languages (1846). In the last two, the impetus of his genius led him on a wrong track.[7] He is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European.[9] Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.[10]

Criticism

Critics have charged Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis. The further charge that Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave undue prominence to Sanskrit is disproved by his own words; for, as early as 1820, he gave it as his opinion that frequently, the cognate languages serve to elucidate grammatical forms lost in Sanskrit (Annals of Or. Lit. i. 3), which he further developed in all his subsequent writings.[7]

The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition of 1911) assesses Bopp and his work as follows:[7]

Bopp's researches, carried with wonderful penetration into the most minute and almost microscopical details of linguistic phenomena, have led to the opening up of a wide and distant view into the original seats, the closer or more distant affinity, and the tenets, practices and domestic usages of the ancient Indo-European nations, and the science of comparative grammar may truly be said to date from his earliest publication. In grateful recognition of that fact, on the fiftieth anniversary (May 16, 1866) of the date of Windischmann's preface to that work, a fund called Die Bopp-Stiftung, for the promotion of the study of Sanskrit and comparative grammar, was established at Berlin, to which liberal contributions were made by his numerous pupils and admirers in all parts of the globe. Bopp lived to see the results of his labours everywhere accepted, and his name justly celebrated. But he died, on the 23rd of October 1867, in poverty, though his genuine kindliness and unselfishness, his devotion to his family and friends, and his rare modesty, endeared him to all who knew him.[7]

English scholar Russell Martineau, who had studied under Bopp, gave the following tribute:[5]

Bopp must, more or less, directly or indirectly, be the teacher of all who at the present day study, not this language or that language, but language itself — study it either as a universal function of man, subjected, like his other mental or physical functions, to law and order, or else as an historical development, worked out by a never ceasing course of education from one form into another.[11]

Martineau also wrote:

"Bopp's Sanskrit studies and Sanskrit publications are the solid foundations upon which his system of comparative grammar was erected, and without which that could not have been perfect. For that purpose, far more than a mere dictionary knowledge of Sanskrit was required. The resemblances which he detected between Sanskrit and the Western cognate tongues existed in the syntax, the combination of words in the sentence and the various devices which only actual reading of the literature could disclose, far more than in the mere vocabulary. As a comparative grammarian he was much more than as a Sanskrit scholar, ... [and yet] it is surely much that he made the grammar, formerly a maze of Indian subtilty, as simple and attractive as that of Greek or Latin, introduced the study of the easier works of Sanskrit literature and trained (personally or by his books) pupils who could advance far higher, invade even the most intricate parts of the literature and make the Vedas intelligible. The great truth which his Comparative Grammar established was that of the mutual relations of the connected languages. Affinities had before him been observed between Latin and German, between German and Slavonic, etc., yet all attempts to prove one the parent of the other had been found preposterous.[11]

Notes

1. Formerly sometimes anglicized as Francis Bopp[3]

References

1. Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry, Volume 7, John Benjamins Publishing, 2002, p. 491.
2. Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge, 1996, p. 85.
3. Baynes 1878, p. 49.
4. Chisholm 1911, p. 240.
5. Rines 1920, p. 261.
6. Chisholm 1911, pp. 240–241.
7. Chisholm 1911, p. 241.
8. Rines 1920, p. 262.
9. Lulushi, Astrit (22 October 2013). "Histori: Çfarë ka ndodhur më 22 tetor?" [History: what happened on 22 October?] (in Albanian). New York: Dielli.
10. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
11. Rines 1920, p. 261 cites Martineau 1867

Sources

• Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), "Francis Bopp" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 49–50
• Martineau, Russell (1867), "Obituary of Franz Bopp", Transactions of the Philological Society, London: 305–14

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911), "Bopp, Franz", Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–241
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920), "Bopp, Franz" , Encyclopedia Americana, 4, pp. 261–262

External links

Franz Bopp, "A Comparative Grammar, Volume 1", 1885, at the Internet Archive.

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Friedrich Schlegel
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

-- Aphorisms, by Friedrich Schlegel

-- Lucinda, by Friedrich Schlegel

-- Works of Frederick von Schlegel: Comprising (1) Letters on Christian Art; (2) An Essay on Gothic Architecture; (3) Remarks on the Romance-Poetry of the Middle Ages and on Shakspere; (4) On the Limits of the Beautiful; and (5) On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, by Frederick von Schlegel, Translated from the German by E.J. Millngton

Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel in 1801
Born: 10 March 1772, Hanover, Electorate of Hanover
Died: 12 January 1829 (aged 56), Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony
Alma mater: University of Göttingen; University of Leipzig
Era: 19th-century philosophy
Region: Western philosophy
School: Jena Romanticism; German idealism[1]; Epistemic coherentism[2]; Coherence theory of truth[3]; Historicism[4]; Romantic linguistics[5]; Republicanism (before 1808); Conservatism (after 1808)
Main interests: Epistemology, philology, philosophy of history
Notable ideas: Grounding epistemology on reciprocal proof (Wechselerweis), not original principle (Grundsatz)[6][2]; Coining the term "historicism", (Historismus)[4]; Out of India theory
Influences: Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder[7]
Influenced: Franz Bopp

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814: von) Schlegel (/ˈʃleɪɡəl/;[8] German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʃleːgl̩];[8][9][10] 10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829) was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.

Born into a fervently Protestant family, Schlegel rejected Christianity as a young man in favor of atheism and individualism. He entered university to study law but instead focused on classical literature. He began a career as a writer and lecturer, and founded journals such as Athenaeum. In 1808 Schlegel converted to Catholicism. His religious conversion ultimately led to his estrangement from family and old friends. He moved to Austria in 1809, where he became a diplomat and journalist in service of Klemens von Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire. Schlegel died in 1829, at the age of 56.[11]

Schlegel was a promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński. The first to notice what became known as Grimm's law, Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, and morphological typology, publishing in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group.[12][13]

Life and work


Hanover's Market Church
Oil painting after Domenico Quaglio (1832)

Karl Friedrich von Schlegel was born on 10 March 1772 at Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was the pastor at the Lutheran Market Church. For two years he studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, and he met with Friedrich Schiller. In 1793 he devoted himself entirely to literary work. In 1796 he moved to Jena, where his brother August Wilhelm lived, and here he collaborated with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Fichte, and Caroline Schelling, who married August Wilhelm. Novalis and Schlegel had a famous conversation about German idealism. In 1797 he quarreled with Schiller, who did not like his polemic work.[14]

Schlegel published Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (History of the Poesy of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). Then he turned to Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare. In Jena he and his brother founded the journal Athenaeum, contributing fragments, aphorisms, and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. They are now generally recognized as the deepest and most significant expressions of the subjective idealism of the early Romanticists.[15] After a controversy, Friedrich decided to move to Berlin. There he lived with Friedrich Schleiermacher and met Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and his future wife, Dorothea Veit, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and the mother of Johannes and Philipp Veit.[11] In 1799 he published Lucinde, an eccentric and unfinished novel, which is remarkable as an attempt to transfer to practical ethics the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom.[16] Lucinde, in which he extolled the union of sensual and spiritual love as an allegory of the divine cosmic Eros, caused a great scandal by its manifest autobiographical character, mirroring his liaison with Dorothea Veit, and it contributed to the failure of his academic career in Jena [15] where he completed his studies in 1801 and lectured as a Privatdozent on transcendental philosophy. In September 1800 he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, albeit with a notable lack of success.

In June 1802 he arrived in Paris, where he lived in the house formerly owned by Baron d'Holbach and joined a circle including Heinrich Christoph Kolbe. He lectured on philosophy in private courses for Sulpiz Boisserée, and under the tutelage of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy and linguist Alexander Hamilton he continued to study Sanskrit and the Persian language. He edited the journal Europa (1803), where he published essays about Gothic architecture and the Old Masters. In April 1804 he married Dorothea Veit in the Swedish embassy in Paris, after she had undergone the requisite conversion from Judaism to Protestantism. In 1806 he and his wife went to visit Aubergenville, where his brother lived with Madame de Staël.

In 1808 he published an epoch-making book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India). Here he advanced his ideas about religion and importantly argued that a people originating from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. Schlegel compared Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, Persian and German, noting many similarities in vocabulary and grammar. The assertion of the common features of these languages is now generally accepted, albeit with significant revisions. There is less agreement about the geographic region where these precursors settled, although the Out-of-India model has generally become discredited.


The unfinished Cologne cathedral (1856) with medieval crane on the south tower

In 1808, he and his wife joined the Roman Catholic Church in the Cologne Cathedral. From this time on, he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious freedom. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the military headquarters, editing the army newspaper and issuing fiery proclamations against Napoleon. He accompanied archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen to war and was stationed in Pest during the War of the Fifth Coalition. Here he studied the Hungarian language. Meanwhile he had published his collected Geschichte (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures, Über die neuere Geschichte (On Recent History) (1811) and Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (On Old and New Literature) (1815). In 1814 he was knighted in the Supreme Order of Christ.


Schlegel's grave at the Old Catholic Cemetery, Dresden

In collaboration with Josef von Pilat, editor of the Österreichischer Beobachter, and with the help of Adam Müller and Friedrich Schlegel, Metternich and Gentz projected a vision of Austria as the spiritual leader of a new Germany, drawing her strength and inspiration from a romanticised view of a medieval Catholic past.[17]

Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), he was councilor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfurt Diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. In 1819 he and Clemens Brentano made a trip to Rome, in the company of Metternich and Gentz. There he met with his wife and her sons. In 1820 he started a conservative Catholic magazine, Concordia (1820–1823), but was criticized by Metternich and by his brother August Wilhelm, then professor of Indology in Bonn and busy publishing the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel began the issue of his Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life) (1828) and in his Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History) (1829). He died on 12 January 1829 at Dresden, while preparing a series of lectures.


Dorothea von Schlegel (1790) by Anton Graff

Dorothea Schlegel

Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea von Schlegel, authored an unfinished romance, Florentin (1802), a Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters (Collection of Romantic Poems of the Middle Ages) (2 vols., 1804), a version of Lother und Maller (1805), and a translation of Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807–1808) — all of which were issued under her husband's name. By her first marriage she had two sons, Johannes and Philipp Veit, who became eminent Catholic painters.

Selected works

• Vom ästhetischen Werte der griechischen Komödie (1794)
• Über die Diotima (1795)
• Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (1796)
• Georg Forster (1797)
• Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1797)
• Über Lessing (1797)
• Kritische Fragmente („Lyceums“-Fragmente) (1797)
• Fragmente („Athenaeums“-Fragmente) (1797–1798)
• Lucinde (1799)
• Über die Philosophie. An Dorothea (1799)
• Gespräch über die Poesie (1800)
• Über die Unverständlichkeit (1800)
• Ideen (1800)
• Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801)
• Transcendentalphilosophie (1801)
• Alarkos (1802)
• Reise nach Frankreich (1803
• Geschichte der europäischen Literatur (1803/1804
• Grundzüge der gotischen Baukunst (1804/1805)
• Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808)
• Deutsches Museum (as ed.), 4 Vols. Vienna (1812–1813)
• Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur (lectures) (1815)

Letters

• Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe ed. by Edgar Lohner (München 1972)
Friedrich Schlegel's Sämtliche Werke appeared in 10 vols. (1822–1825); a second edition (1846) in 55 vols. His Prosaische Jugendschriften (1794–1802) have been edited by J. Minor (1882, 2nd ed. 1906); there are also reprints of Lucinde, and F. Schleiermacher's Vertraute Briefe über Lucinde, 1800 (1907). See R. Haym, Die romantische Schule (1870); I. Rouge, F. Schlegel et la genie du romantisme allemand (1904); by the same, Erläuterungen zu F. Schlegels „Lucinde“ (1905); M. Joachimi, Die Weltanschauung der Romantik (1905); W. Glawe, Die Religion F. Schlegels (1906); E. Kircher, Philosophie der Romantik (1906); M. Frank "Unendliche Annäherung". Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (1997); Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (1997).

Notes

1. Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 349.
2. Asko Nivala, The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History, Routledge, 2017, p. 23.
3. Elizabeth Millan, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy, SUNY Press, 2012, p. 49.
4. Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 175: "[The word 'historicism'] appears as early as the late eighteenth century in the writings of the German romantics, who used it in a neutral sense. In 1797 Friedrich Schlegel used 'historicism' to refer to a philosophy that stresses the importance of history ..."; Katherine Harloe, Neville Morley (eds.), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 81: "Already in Friedrich Schlegel's Fragments about Poetry and Literature (a collection of notes attributed to 1797), the word Historismusoccurs five times."
5. Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry, Volume 7, John Benjamins Publishing, 2002, p. 491.
6. Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 81.
7. Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 9.
8. Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 9781405881180
9. "Friedrich – Französisch-Übersetzung – Langenscheidt Deutsch-Französisch Wörterbuch" (in German and French). Langenscheidt. Retrieved 20 October 2018.
10. "Duden | Schlegel | Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition". Duden (in German). Retrieved 20 October 2018.
11. Speight (, Allen 2007). "Friedrich Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy..
12. Watkins, Calvert (2000), "Aryan", American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), New York: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-82517-2, ...when Friedrich Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian words with the German word Ehre, 'honor', and older Germanic names containing the element ario-, such as the Swiss [sic] warrior Ariovistus who was written about by Julius Caesar. Schlegel theorized that far from being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya- had in fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning [according to Schlegel] something like 'the honorable people.' (This theory has since been called into question.)
13. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1819. Review of J. G. Rhode, Über den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte Revolution der Erde, Breslau, 1819. Jahrbücher der Literatur VIII: 413ff
14. Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, 1993, p. 36.
15. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.
16. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
17. Adam Zamoyski (2007), Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, pp. 242–243.

Further reading

• Berman, Antoine. L'épreuve de l'étranger. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin., Paris, Gallimard, Essais, 1984. ISBN 978-2-07-070076-9
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, Albany: State University Press of New York, 1988. [A philosophical exegesis of early romantic theory focused on F. Schlegel, Novalis, and the Athenaeum.]

External links

• Works by Friedrich Schlegel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Friedrich Schlegel at Internet Archive
• Works by Friedrich Schlegel at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Dictionary of Art
• "Schlegel, Friedrich von" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
• "Schlegel, Friedrich von" . The Nuttall Encyclopædia. 1907.
• "Friedrich von Schlegel" . Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913.
• "Schlegel, Friedrich von" . Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.
• Works by Friedrich Schlegel at Projekt Gutenberg-DE (in German)
• "Works by Friedrich Schlegel". Zeno.org (in German).
• Franz Muncker (1891), "Schlegel, Friedrich von", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) (in German), 33, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 737–752
• "Friedrich Schlegel". Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German).
• Literature by and about Friedrich Schlegel in the German National Library catalogue
• Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1841 "Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1772–1829; Robertson, James Burton, 1800–1877, 1846 "The philosophy of history : in a course of lectures, delivered at Vienna". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Schiller, Friedrich, 1759–1805; Körner, Christian Gottfried, 1756–1831; Simpson, Leonard Francis, translated 1849 "Correspondence of Schiller with Körner. Comprising sketches and anecdotes of Goethe, the Schlegels, Wielands, and other contemporaries". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1855 "The philosophy of life, and Philosophy of language, in a course of lectures". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Friedrich von Schlegel, Ellen J . Millington, 1860 "The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich Von Schlegel". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Samuel Paul Capen, 1903 "Friedrich Schlegel's Relations with Reichardt and His Contributions to "Deutschland"". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Wilson, Augusta Manie, 1908 "The principle of the ego in philosophy with special reference to its influence upon Schlegel's doctrine of "ironie"". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Calvin Thomas, 1913 "Friedrich Schlegel, Introduction to Lucinda". Retrieved 2010-09-28.

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August Wilhelm Schlegel
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

-- Lectures on Dramatic Art, by August Wilhelm Schlegel

August Schlegel
Born: 8 September 1767, Hanover, Electorate of Hanover
Died: 12 May 1845 (aged 77), Bonn, Rhine Province
Alma mater: University of Göttingen
Era: 19th-century philosophy
Region: Western Philosophy
School: Jena Romanticism; Historicism[1]
Institutions: University of Bonn
Main interests: Philology, philosophy of history
Influences: Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder[2]

August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (/ˈʃleɪɡəl/; German: [ˈʃleːgl̩]; 8 September 1767 – 12 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 translations of Shakespeare turned the English dramatist's works into German classics.[3] Schlegel was also the professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita.

Life


The Marktkirche at the beginning of the 19th century; oil painting after Domenico Quaglio, 1832

Schlegel was born in Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was a Lutheran pastor. He was educated at the Hanover gymnasium and at the University of Göttingen.[4] Initially studying theology, he received a thorough philological training under Heyne and became an admirer and friend of Bürger, with whom he was engaged in an ardent study of Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare. Schlegel met with Caroline Böhmer and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In 1790 his brother Friedrich came to Göttingen. Both were influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Tiberius Hemsterhuis, Johann Winckelmann and Karl Theodor von Dalberg. From 1791 to 1795, Schlegel was tutor to the children of Mogge Muilman, a Dutch banker, who lived at the prestigious Herengracht in Amsterdam.[5]

In 1796, soon after his return to Germany, Schlegel settled in Jena, following an invitation from Schiller.[6] That year he married Caroline, the widow of the physician Böhmer.[4] She assisted Schlegel in some of his literary productions, and the publication of her correspondence in 1871 established for her a posthumous reputation as a German letter writer. She separated from Schlegel in 1801 and became the wife of the philosopher Schelling soon after.[6]

In Jena, Schlegel made critical contributions to Schiller's Horen and that author's Musen-Almanach,[4] and wrote around 300 articles for the Jenaer Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung. He also did translations from Dante and Shakespeare. This work established his literary reputation and gained for him in 1798 an extraordinary professorship at the University of Jena. His house became the intellectual headquarters of the "romanticists", and was visited at various times between 1796 and 1801 by Fichte, whose Foundations of the Science of Knowledge was studied intensively, by his brother Friedrich, who moved in with his wife Dorothea, by Schelling, by Tieck, by Novalis and others.[6]


Schlegel c. 1800

It is widely accepted that the Romantic Movement in Germany emerged, on the one hand, as a reaction against the aesthetical ideals defended in Classicism and Neoclassicism, and on the other, as a deviation from the rational principles of the Enlightenment with the consequent regression to the irrational spirit of the Middle Ages.[7]

Schlegel argues that, from a philosophical point of view, everything participates in an ongoing process of creation, whereas, from an empirical point of view, natural things are conceived as if they were dead, fixed and independent from the whole.[7]

In 1797 August and Friedrich broke with Friedrich Schiller. With his brother, Schlegel founded the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the organ of the Romantic school, in which he dissected disapprovingly the immensely popular works of the sentimental novelist August Lafontaine.[8] He also published a volume of poems and carried on a controversy with Kotzebue. At this time the two brothers were remarkable for the vigour and freshness of their ideas and commanded respect as the leaders of the new Romantic criticism. A volume of their joint essays appeared in 1801 under the title Charakteristiken und Kritiken. His play Ion, performed in Weimar in January 1802, was supported by Goethe, but became a failure.

When the work of art appears as if all its elements had been consciously chosen by a power above the artist, it has style; when the artist has not transcended his/her individuality, then s/he is categorized as a mannerist artist (SW III, 309–312).[7]

In 1801 Schlegel went to Berlin, where he delivered lectures on art and literature; and in the following year he published Ion, a tragedy in Euripidean style, which gave rise to a suggestive discussion on the principles of dramatic poetry. This was followed by Spanisches Theater (2 vols, 1803/1809), in which he presented admirable translations of five of Calderón's plays. In another volume, Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie (1804), he gave translations of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian lyrics. He also translated works by Dante and Camões.[4][3]

Early in 1804, he made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël in Berlin, who hired him as a tutor for her children. After divorcing his wife Caroline, Schlegel travelled with Madame de Staël to Switzerland, Italy and France, acting as an adviser in her literary work.[9] In 1807 he attracted much attention in France by an essay in the French, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide, in which he attacked French classicism from the standpoint of the Romantic school. His famous lectures on dramatic art and literature (Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 1809–1811), which have been translated into most European languages, were delivered at Vienna in 1808.[4][6] He was accompanied by De Staël and her children. In 1810 Schlegel was ordered to leave the Swiss Confederation as an enemy of the French literature.[10]

For Schlegel, the magic of a work of art is that it brings us into a different world, with all its own internal coherence, and this is why it needs to become organic and complete unto itself. Therefore, its purpose should not be to reflect the real world with naturalism, but rather to create its own world, which could never be a question of applying a set of rules and principles to a particular matter (paintings, words, marble), such as classicist principles seemed to do.[7]

In 1812, he travelled with De Staël, her fiancé Albert de Rocca and her children to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Stockholm and acted as secretary of Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, through whose influence the right of his family to noble rank was revived. After this, he joined again the household of Mme. de Staël until her death in 1817, for like Mathieu de Montmorency he was one of her intimates until the end of her life. Schlegel was made a professor of literature at the University of Bonn in 1818, and during the remainder of his life occupied himself chiefly with oriental studies. He founded a special printing office for Sanskrit. As an orientalist, he was unable to adapt himself to the new methods opened up by Bopp.[4][6] He corresponded with Wilhelm von Humboldt, a linguist. After the death of Madame de Staël, Schlegel married (1818) a daughter of Heinrich Paulus, but this union was dissolved in 1821.[4]

Schlegel continued to lecture on art and literature, publishing in 1827 On the Theory and History of the Plastic Arts,[3] and in 1828 two volumes of critical writings (Kritische Schriften). In 1823–30 he published the journal Indische Bibliothek. In 1823 edited the Bhagavad Gita, with a Latin translation, and in 1829, the Ramayana. This was followed by his 1832 work Reflections on the Study of the Asiatic Languages.[3][4] Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare, begun in Jena, was ultimately completed, under the superintendence of Ludwig Tieck, by Tieck's daughter Dorothea and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin. This rendering is considered one of the best poetical translations in German, or indeed in any language.[4] In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn, at the age of 17, was inspired by August Wilhelm's translation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to write a homonymous concert overture. Schlegel's brother Friedrich's wife was an aunt of Mendelssohn.[11]

In 1835, Schlegel became head of the committee organising a monument in memory of Ludwig van Beethoven in Bonn, the composer's birthplace. Schlegel died in Bonn in 1845,[4] three months before its official unveiling.

Evaluations

According to Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition,

As an original poet Schlegel is unimportant, but as a poetical translator he has rarely been excelled, and in criticism he put into practice the Romantic principle that a critic's first duty is not to judge from the standpoint of superiority, but to understand and to "characterize" a work of art.[4]

Traugott Böhme, in his article for the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana, gives the following thoughts:

As a critic [Schlegel] carried on the tradition of Lessing and Herder. Without possessing Lessing's power of style and personality, [Schlegel] commanded a wider range of artistic susceptibility. His unerring linguistic and historical scholarship and the calm objectivity of his judgment enabled him to carry out, even more successfully than Herder himself, Herder's demand that literary criticism should be based on a sympathetic penetration into the specific individuality of each poetic production rather than on the application of preconceived aesthetic standards.

Schlegel established models for the new method of analytical and interpretative criticism in his essays on Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea and on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. His Vienna lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature were translated into most of the languages of Europe and stand as a permanent contribution to critical literature; his definition of the terms "classic" and "romantic" met with general recognition; his views on the so-called "three unities" and on the "correctness" of Shakespeare evoked an especially strong echo in England and finally made the Johnsonian attitude toward Shakespeare appear obsolete.

Formal perfection of language is the chief merit of his poems, which suffer from a lack of originality. In his drama Ion, he vainly attempted to rival Goethe's Iphigenie. He prided himself on being "model and master in the art of sonnets" among the Germans. He is at his best in sparkling literature parodies such as Ehrenpforte und Triumphbogen für Kotzebue (1801).[6]

The 1905 New International Encyclopedia, in its article on Schlegel, gives the following opinions:

• The Schlegel-Tieck translation is universally considered better than any other rendering of Shakespeare in a foreign language. Thanks to Schlegel and Tieck, Shakespeare has become a national poet of Germany.
• [Schlegel's] Spanisches Theater (1803-09), consisting of five pieces of Calderon's, admirably translated,... [made] that poet a favorite with the German people, and his Blumensträusse der italienischen, spanischen und portugiesischen Poesie (Berlin, 1804), a charming collection of southern lyrics, [marks] the appearance of . . . the naturalization in German verse of the metrical forms of the Romanic races.
• Schlegel was quarrelsome, jealous, and ungenerous in his relations with literary men, and did not even shrink from slander when his spleen was excited.

Honors

• Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1836.[12]

Portraits

• Portrait of A. W. Schlegel by Albert Gregorius (1774–1853), 1817, in Coppet Castle (Switzerland)

Works

• Ion (1803)[13]
• Rom Elegie(1805)
• Schlegel's Berlin lectures of 1801/1804 reprinted from manuscript notes by Jakob Minor (1884)[4]
• Poetische Werke (1811)
• Observations sur la langue et la littératures provençale (1818)
• Bhagavad Gita (1823, Latin translation)
• Kritische Schriften (1828, critical works)
• Sämtliche Werke (1846–1848) (Collected Works) issued in twelve volumes by Eduard Böcking
• Œuvres écrites en français (3 vols., 1846)
• Opuscula Latine scripta (1848)

Translation

Schlegel's Shakespeare translations have been often reprinted. The edition of 1871–72 was revised with Schlegel's manuscripts by Michael Bernays. See Bernays's Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (1872); Rudolph Genée, Schlegel und Shakespeare (1903). Schlegel also translated plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, such as La banda y flor, which became the basis for E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1807 singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht.

A selection of the writings of both August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, edited by Oskar Walzel, will be found in Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, 143 (1892).

Letters

• Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe ed. by Edgar Lohner (München 1972)

Notes

1. Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 175.
2. Eugenio Coșeriu, "Zu Hegels Semantik," Kwartalnik neofilologiczny, 24 (1977), p. 185 n. 8.
3. Reynolds, Francis J., ed. (1921). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . Collier's New Encyclopedia. New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company.
4. Chisholm 1911.
5. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry by Roger Paulin, p. 59
6. Traugott Böhme 1920.
7. Hay, Katia D., "August Wilhelm von Schlegel", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/schlegel-aw/>
8. Dirk Sangmeister, Der Lieblingsdichter der Nation..., article in German newspaper Die Zeit no. 31, 1999.
9. She owed to him many of the ideas which she embodied in her work, De l'Allemagne, published in 1813.
10. L.M. Child (1836) The biography of Madame de Stael, p. 48
11. Portland Chamber Orchestra Archived August 7, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
12. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
13. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1803). "Ion: Ein Schauspiel".

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von". Encyclopædia Britannica. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 328–329.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.

Further reading

• Paulin, R. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers (2016) ISBN 9781909254954
• Rudolf Haym, Romantische Schule (1870; new ed., 1914)
• Franz Muncker (1890), "Schlegel, August Wilhelm", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) (in German), 31, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 354–368
• Strauss, D. Fr., Kleine Schriften (1862)
• Huch, Ricarda, ‘Blütezeit der Romantik (1899)
• Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik (ed. by Erich Schmidt, 2 vols., 1913)
• Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred, Caroline Schlegel and her Friends (1889)
• Bernays, M., Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (1872), new ed. Celtis Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-944253-02-2
• Genée, R., A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare (1903)
• Gundolf, F, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911)
• Helmholtz, A. A., The Indebtedness of S. T. Coleridge to A. W. Schlegel (1907)
• da Rocha Abreu, Manuel: Zwischenruf - Rassistisch. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, 17 January 2006, P. 26.

External links

• Works by August Wilhelm von Schlegel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about August Wilhelm Schlegel at Internet Archive
• Phelan, Anna Augusta von Helmholtz, 1907 "The indebtedness of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to August Wilhelm von Schlegel". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Francke, Kuno, Howard, William Guild, Schiller, Friedrich, 1913-1914 "The German classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries : masterpieces of German literature translated into English Vol 4". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Hay, Katia D. "August Wilhelm von Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Translating Shakespeare - process and problems of translating the works of William Shakespeare, done by Schlegel
• Schlegel, August Wilhelm : von (1817). Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und literatur. ita. Milano: dalla stamperia di Paolo Emilio Giusti, nella contr. di s. Margherita, al n.o 1118.

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Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20


Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy
Born: 21 September 1758, Paris, France
Died: 21 February 1838 (aged 79), Paris, France
Occupation: French Linguist, Orientalist, Councillor

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (French: [sasi]; 21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Life and works

Early life

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist.[1] He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family. The surname extension of "de Sacy" was added by the younger son after the name of Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, a famous Jansenist cleric who lived in the XVIIth century. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated on his own by his mother.

Philological studies

In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department.

The Cour des monnaies (French pronunciation: ​[kuʁ de mɔnɛ], Currency Court) was one of the sovereign courts of Ancien Régime France. It was set up in 1552. It and the other Ancien Régime tribunals were suppressed in 1791 after the French Revolution.

The regulation of coin-making was royal regulation par excellence and very soon became the object of strict surveillance and dedicated judicial institutions. Monetary crimes were particularly severely punished, and coin clipping and counterfeiting could be punishable by death. At first monetary justice was exercised by généraux des monnaies, but in 1346 this passed to a dedicated Chambre des monnaies, set up in 1358 at the Palais de la Cité in buildings adjoining the Chambre des comptes. Appeals against sentences passed in the Chambre des monnaies were taken to the Parlement until January 1552, when the Chambre was turned into a sovereign court called the Cour des monnaies. The pioneering historian of the French language and medieval French literature, Claude Fauchet, served as President of the Cour des monnaies from 1581-1599.

-- Cour des monnaies, by Wikipedia

Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings.[2][3] In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages[4] (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes).

During this interval Sacy studied the religion of the Druze, the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). He published the following Arabic textbooks:[4]

• Grammaire arabe (2 vols., 1st ed. 1810)
• Chrestomathie arabe (3 vols., 1806)
• Anthologie grammaticale (1829)

In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.[4]

Public offices and memberships

He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was created a baron of the French Empire by Napoleon in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, be became a peer of France and regularly spoke in the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des Pairs). In 1815 he became rector of the University of Paris, and after the Second Restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Rémusat, he was joint founder of the Société asiatique, and was inspector of oriental typefaces at the Imprimerie nationale.[4] In 1821 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society[5]

Egyptian hieroglyphics research

Silvestre de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription.

From 1807 to 1809, Sacy was also a teacher of Jean-François Champollion, whom he encouraged in his research.

But later on, the relationship between the master and student became chilly. In no small measure, Champollion's Napoleonic sympathies were problematic for Sacy, who was decidedly Royalist in his political sympathies.

In 1811, Étienne Marc Quatremère, also a student of Sacy, published his Mémoires géographiques et historiques sur l'Égypte… sur quelques contrées voisines.

There was some rivalry between Champollion and Quatremère. Champollion published a paper in 1814 that covered some of the same territory. The allegations then arose that Champollion had plagiarized the work of Quatremère. Silvestre de Sacy seemed to take the side of Quatremère, according to Champollion.[6]

There was also considerable rivalry between Champollion and Thomas Young, an English Egyptology researcher active in hieroglyphic decipherment. At first they cooperated in their work, but later, from around 1815, a chill arose between them. Again, Sacy took the side of Young.

Young started to correspond with Sacy, who advised Young not to share his work with Champollion and described Champollion as a charlatan. Consequently, Young avoided all direct contact with Champollion.[7]

When Champollion submitted his Coptic grammar and dictionary for publication in 1815, de Sacy also opposed this.

Another student of Sacy was Johan David Åkerblad. He was a Swedish scholar who also contributed significantly to the investigation of the Rosetta Stone. Early on, in 1802, Åkerblad published his version of the Demotic alphabet; sixteen of these letters later proved to be correct and were used by Champollion, as well as by Young. Sacy felt that Akerblad was not getting enough credit for the good work that he was doing.

Thus, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics was being hampered by political and personal considerations. There were also big political rivalries between England and France at that time that also stood in the way of co-operation.

Nevertheless, when, in spite of all adversity, Champollion had made big progress in decipherment by 1822—resulting in his Lettre à M. Dacier—Sacy cast all politics aside and warmly welcomed the good work of his student.

Other scholarly works

Among his other works are his edition of Hariri (1822), with a selected Arabic commentary, and of the Alfiya (1833), and his Calila et Dimna (1816), the Arabic version of the Panchatantra which has been in various forms one of the most popular books of the world. Other works include a version of Abd-el-Latif, Relation arabe sur l'Egypte, essays on the history of the law of property in Egypt since the Arab conquest (1805–1818), and The Book of Wandering Stars, a translation of a history of the Ottoman Empire and its rule of Egypt, particularly its recounting of the various actions of and events under the Ottoman governors of Egypt. To biblical criticism he contributed a memoir on the Samaritan Arabic Pentateuch (Mém. Acad. des Inscr. vol. xlix), and editions of the Arabic and Syriac New Testaments for the British and Foreign Bible Society. His students include Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer.[4]

Critical studies

Edward Said and other modern scholars have given critical attention to the theoretical foundations of "orientalism" in works like Chrestomathie arabe.[8]

Famous students

• Jean-François Champollion, orientalist, translator of the Rosetta stone
• Étienne Marc Quatremère, a French orientalist who contributed to the research in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
• Johan David Åkerblad, a Swedish diplomat and orientalist; he contributed to the investigation of the Rosetta Stone.
• John Martin Augustine Scholz, Professor in Bonn
• Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Professor in Leipzig
• Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten, Professor in Jena and in Greifswald
• August Ferdinand Mehren, Professor in Copenhagen
• Justus Olshausen, Professor in Kiel
• Johann Gustav Stickel (1805–1896), Professor in Jena
• Carl Johan Tornberg [sv] (1807–77), Professor in Uppsala[9]
• Louis-Mathieu Langlès, Curator, Bibliothèque Nationale
• Adam Franz Lennig, German Catholic theologian, and one of the most influential German priests of his day.
• Samuel Gobat, Anglican-Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem

Silvestre de Sacy assisted the young composer Fromental Halévy in his early career, giving him a testimonial during his application for the Prix de Rome.

Sacy died in his native city of Paris, aged 79.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 1,000+ works in 1,000+ publications in 16 languages and 3,000+ library holdings.[10]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

• Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse: et sur les médailles des rois de la dynastie des Sassanides; suivis de l'histoire de cette dynastie (1793)
• Principes de grammaire générale : mis à la portée des enfans, et propres à servir d'introduction à l'étude de toutes les langues (1799)
• Mémoire sur divers événements de l'histoire des Arabes avant Mahomet (1803)
• Chrestomathie arabe, ou, Extraits de divers écrivains arabes, tant en prose qu'en vers, avec une traduction française et des notes, à l'usage des élèves de l'École royale et spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1806)
• Specimen historiae arabum by Bar Hebraeus (1806)
• Mémoire sur la dynastie des Assassins et sur l'origine de leur nom (1809)
• Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1810)
• Les séances de Hariri, publiées en arabe avec un commentaire choisi by Ḥarīrī (1822)
• Anthologie grammaticale arabe: ou, Morceaux choisis de divers grammairiens et scholiastes arabes, avec une traduction française et des notes ; pouvant faire suite a la Chrestomathie arabe (1829)
• Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1831)
• Exposé de la religion des druzes, tiré des livres religieux de cette secte, et précédé d'une introduction et de la Vie du khalife Hakem-biamr-Allah (1838)
• Les mille et une nuits; contes arabes (1839)
• Bibliothèque de M. le baron Silvestre de Sacy (1846)
• Mélanges de littérature orientale (1861)

References

1. Silvestre de Sacy. Le projet européen d'une science orientaliste, éditions du Cerf, 2014
2. Kramer, Samuel Noah (1971). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. University of Chicago Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-226-45238-8.
3. Sacred Books of the East. Library of Alexandria. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-4655-1068-6.
4. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac". Encyclopædia Britannica. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 119.
5. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
6. Adkins & Adkins 2000, p. 97–8.
7. Adkins & Adkins 2000, p. 129.
8. Spanos, William V. (2003). The Legacy of Edward W. Said, p. 101., p. 101, at Google Books
9. Carl Johan Tornberg (in Swedish)
10. WorldCat Identities Archived December 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine: Silvestre de Sacy, A. I. (Antoine Isaac) 1758-1838
• Adkins, Lesley; Adkins, Roy (2000). The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-019439-1.

External links

• Works by or about Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy at Internet Archive
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 1 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. p. 8. Retrieved 2011-07-06.
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 2 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. Retrieved 2011-07-06.