Heinrich Lüders


Heinrich Lüders was a German Orientalist and Indologist known for his epigraphical analysis of the Sanskrit Turfan fragmentary manuscripts.

Biography

From 1888 to 1894 he studied at the universities of Munich and Göttingen, and afterwards worked as an assistant curator and librarian in the Indian Institute at Oxford University. In 1898 he became an associate professor at Göttingen, then five years later relocated to Rostock, where in 1905 he was named professor of Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit. In 1909 he was appointed professor of ancient Indian languages and literature at the University of Berlin, where in 1931/32 he served as academic rector. In 1935 he retired from teaching and devoted himself entirely to research.
From 1920 to 1938 he served as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
In 1932 he was recipient of the Goethe-Medaille für Kunst und Wissenschaft. He was also appointed to the "Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission" for his expertise in the languages Bengali, Pashto, and Gurung. The purpose of the commission was to record the approximately 250 languages spoken by the prisoners of German WWI PoW camps.

Published works