Rudolf Hoernlé

Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernlé CIE (1841 – 1918), also referred to as Rudolf Hoernle or A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, was a German Indologist and philologist. the son of a German Protestant missionary family. His father Christian Theophilus Hoernle (1804–1882) had translated the gospels into Kurdish and Urdu, and came from a family with a history of missionary activity and social activism in southwest Germany.

Hoernlé was elected the President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1897.

Hoernle is perhaps best known for his decipherment of the Bower Manuscript collected by Hamilton Bower in Kucha (Chinese Turkestan). Bower found the birch-bark manuscript in 1890 and it was sent to Hoernle in early 1891. Within months, Hoernle had deciphered and translated it, establishing it to be a medical treatise and the oldest known manuscript from ancient India.

He was an early scholar of Khotanese and Tocharian languages, which he had sensed as a different Indo-Aryan language in some of the texts that formed the Weber manuscript.

Victim of forgery As his breakthrough studies gained fame, various governments including the British government sought and offered handsome rewards for ancient manuscripts. This led to major forgeries, and Hoernlé was deceived by some. Hoernle was concerned about potential for forgery, as some of the fragmentary manuscripts he received appeared to contain Central Asian scripts but made no sense in any language.

Thereafter, he published A Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia: Part 1 on them. The truth about the forged manuscripts by Islam Akhun was confirmed during a site visit to Khotan by the explorer and long term collaborator Sir Aurel Stein and revealed to Hoernle. Stein found many manuscript fragments similar to the Bower and Weber manuscripts in different parts of Central Asia but found nothing remotely similar to those sold by Islam Akhun and ultimately delivered through Macartney to Hoernle since 1895.

Two-wave Indo-Aryan migration Hoernle proposed the two-wave theory of the Indo-Aryan migration. According to this theory, Aryans invaded the subcontinent first through Kabul valley, then much later in a second invasion, the Aryans arrived in much larger numbers into a more drier climatic period moving and settling into the Gangetic plains. The second invasion, he proposed, occurred before the Rigveda was composed and before the earliest version of the Sanskrit language took a form. The first invaders spoke Magadhi, the second spoke Sauraseni, according to Hoernle. This theory was adopted by later scholars such as George Abraham Grierson.

In addition to his palaeographical and codicological work, Hoernlé published an important series of editions and studies on the history of medicine in South Asia, including a magisterial edition, translation and study of the Bower Manuscript.

World War I Hoernle, of German heritage and living his retirement in England, was deeply dismayed by World War I.

He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) in 1897.

Family Hoernlé was the second of nine children. In 1877 Hoernlé married Sophie Fredericke Louise Romig; the philosopher Alfred Hoernlé was their son.

Publications A history of India, Cuttack: Orissa Mission Press 1907 Studies in the medicine of ancient India, Part I. Osteology, Or The Bones of the Human Body, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1907 Manuscript remains of Buddhist literature found in Eastern Turkestan; facsimiles with transcripts, translation and notes, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1916 The Bower Manuscript, Calcutta 1897