[Extract …] Much has been written about the Central Asian explorer and archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein, but his early collaborator Rudolf Hoernle is comparatively less well-known despite his key role in deciphering newly discovered Central Asian languages and managing the cataloguing and editing of all Stein’s Brahmi script material until his death in 1918. In this paper I shall attempt to expand on the somewhat complex relationship between them, summarising Hoernle’s work and drawing on some relatively unknown sources.1

Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernle2 was born on 14 November 1841 in Secundra, India, the second of nine surviving children of the Reverend Christian Theophilus Hoernle. He came from a long line of missionaries which included both linguists and revolutionaries: his father translated the gospels into Kurdish and Urdu; his uncle Theodor Mögling had been a leading force in the 1848 Baden revolution in Germany. In the next generation, his son, Alfred (1880–1943), became a distinguished philosopher, while his nephew Edwin (1883–1952) had a successful political career in the German Democratic Republic as Minister for Agriculture and Forestry. At the age of seven Hoernle was sent home to his grandparents in Germany for his education. After completing theological studies in Schönthal and the University of Basle, he went to theological college in London in 1860, and, from 1864 to 1865, he studied Sanskrit at University College London with Theodor Goldstücker.3

Hoernle was ordained in 1864 and returned to India in 1865, where he was posted by the Church Missionary Society to Mirat. In 1869, he was transferred, at his own request, from active missionary service to work as Professor of Sanskrit and Philosophy at Jay Narayan College, Benares. It was there that he several times met and talked to Dayananda Sarasvati,4 founder of the Arya Samaj movement, and his first publication was a report of Dayananda’s public disputation in Benares in 1869.5 From 1878 to 1881, Hoernle was Principal of the Cathedral Mission College, Calcutta, and, in 1881, he joined the Indian Educational Service as Principal of the Calcutta Madrasah. During these years he was engaged by the Government to inspect coins and archaeological finds in general, and was latterly put on Special Duty to report on the finds from Central Asia which subsequently became known as the British Collection of Central Asian Antiquities. In 1899 he retired to England at the age of 58 and settled in Oxford where he lived until his death after a short attack of influenza on 12 November 1918.

• 1. This paper is based on a presentation given at ‘A Hundred Years of Dunhuang, 1907–2007’, 17–19 May 2007, organised jointly by the British Academy with the British Museum and British Library.
• 2. See U. Sims-Williams, ‘Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernle’, Encyclopaedia Iranica 12, New York, 2004, pp. 418–20.
• 3. Theodor H. Goldstücker, (1821–72), Indologist and Professor of Sanskrit at University College, London from 1852.
• 4. Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–83), Hindu religious scholar, reformer.
• 5. A.F.R. Hoernle, ‘A Hindoo reformer’, The Christian intelligencer, Calcutta (March 1870) p. 79: a report of Dayananda Sarasvati’s public disputation in Benares in 1869.