Eduard Sachau

Carl Eduard Sachau (20 July 1845 – 17 September 1930) was a German orientalist. He taught Josef Horovitz and Eugen Mittwoch.

Biography He studied oriental languages at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig, obtaining his PhD at Halle in 1867. Sachau became a professor extraordinary of Semitic philology (1869) and a full professor (1872) at the University of Vienna, and in 1876, a professor at the University of Berlin, where he was appointed director of the new Seminar of Oriental languages (1887).

Sachau travelled to the Near East on several occasions (see his book Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien, published 1883) and became known for his work on Syriac and other Aramaic dialects. He was an expert on polymath Al-Biruni and wrote a translation of Kitab ta'rikh al-Hind, Al-Biruni's encyclopedic work on India. Sachau also wrote papers on Ibadi Islam.

While a student at Kiel, he became part of the fraternity Teutonia Kiel (1864). He was a member of the Vienna and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London and the American Oriental Society. He worked as a consultant in the planning and construction of the Baghdad Railway. Among his better known students was Eugen Mittwoch, a founder of modern Islamic studies in Germany.

He received the honorary degree Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from the University of Oxford in October 1902, in connection with the tercentenary of the Bodleian Library.