Brockhaus, Hermann

Brockhaus, Hermann a German Orientalist, was born at Amsterdam, January 28, 1806. He studied at different universities, and after completing his studies spent many years at Copenhagen, Paris, London, and Oxford. In 1839 he was appointed professor at Jena, and in 1841 he was called to Leipsic, where he died, January 5, 1877. He published in Sanscrit, with a German translation, the Katha sarit Sagara, a collection of legends of Somadeva (Leipsic, 1839-62): — an edition of Prabodha Candrodya, a comedy of Krishna. Misra, together with the Indian Scholia (ibid. 1845): — Nashebi's Persian edition of the Seven Wise Men (ibid. eod.): — a critical edition of the poems of Hafiz (ibid. 1854-61, 3 volumes; 1863, new ed. in 1 volume): — an edition of the Vendidad Sade, prepared after the lithographed editions published at Paris and Bombay, together with a word-book and a glossary of the Zend language (ibid. 1850). As one of the founders of the German Oriental Society, he edited its quarterly from 1852 to 1860, and from 1856 he edited the famous Allgemeine Encyklopadie of Ersch u. Gruber. He advocated the system now generally adopted of transcribing the Sanscrit and the other Oriental languages, as Persian, Arabic, etc., with Roman letters, on which see his Ueber. den Druck sanskritischer Werke mit lateinischen Buchstaben (Leipsic, 1841) and Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschoft (ibid. 1863, volume 17). (B.P.)