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Biography
Carl Eduard Sachau (20 July 1845 – 17 September 1930) was a German orientalist.
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).
He travelled to the Near East on several occasions (see his book Reise in Syrien und Mesopotamien, published 1883) . He is especially noteworthy for his work on Syriac and other Aramaic dialects. He was an expert on Persian polymath Al-Biruni and wrote a translation of Kitab ta'rikh al-Hind, Al-Biruni's encyclopedic work on India. Also, Sachau wrote papers related to Ibadism.
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.
Papers related to Ibadism
- Sachau, Eduard: (1894) Muhammedanisches Erbrecht nach der Lehre der ibaditischen Araber von Zanzibar und Ostafrika. Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, VIII (1894), 159-210.
- Sachau, Eduard: (1898a) [Yaḥyà ibn Khalfān al-Kharūṣi] Das Gutachten eines muhammedanischen Juristen über die muhammedanischen Rechtsverhältnisse in Ost-Afrika. Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der königlichen Friedrich Wilhelms- Universität zu Berlin, Jahrgang I (1898), Abt. III, 1-8.
- Sachau, Eduard: (1898b) Über eine arabische Chronik aus Zanzibar. Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der königlichen Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Westasiatische Studien (Berlin), I. Band, Abtheilung 2 (1898), 1-19.
- Sachau, Eduard: (1899) Über die religiösen Anschauungen der ibadhitischen Muhammedaner in Oman und Ostafrika. Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der königlichen Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Westasiatische Studien (Berlin), Band II, 2. Abtheilung (1899) 47-82.
