Rudolf Hoernlé
Born in India to a Protestant missionary family from Germany, he completed his education in Switzerland, and studied Sanskrit in the United Kingdom.
[4] He retired from the Indian office in 1899 and settled in Oxford, where he continued to work through the 1910s on archaeological discoveries in Central Asia and India.
[2][3] Rudolf Hoernle was born in Sikandra, near Agra, British India on 14 November 1841,[2][3] the son of a German Protestant missionary family.
He requested a transfer from active missionary service, and accepted a teaching position at the Jay Narayan college in Varanasi (Benares Hindu University), coming in contact with Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj movement.
In 1878, he published a book on the comparative grammar of north Indian languages, which established his reputation as an insightful philologist as well as won him the Volney Prize of the Institut de France.
[3] During the 1880s, he published numerous notes and articles on numismatics and epigraphy in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Indian Antiquary, along with translations of medieval era Hindu and Jain Sanskrit texts.
Within months, Hoernle had deciphered and translated it, establishing it to be a medical treatise and the oldest known manuscript from ancient India.
[3] His fame led the British India government to seek more manuscripts and archaeological items from Xinjiang (China) and Central Asia, sending him 23 consignments of discoveries before he retired.
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.
[4] In a preliminary report in 1897, Hoernle wrote about the new manuscripts he had received from Khotan, the following: ...[they are] written in characters which are either quite unknown to me, or with which I am too imperfectly acquainted to attempt a ready reading in the scanty leisure that my regular official duties allow me ... My hope is that among those of my fellow-labourers who have made the languages of Central Asia their speciality, there may be some who may be able to recognize and identify the characters and language of these curious documents.
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.
It had already been widely distributed after being published as a special number of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and Stein had already disclosed the forgery that formed that collection.
Hoernle did include a note for the benefit of all scholars, stating: "... Dr Stein has obtained definitive proof that all blockprints and all the manuscripts in unknown characters procured from Khotan since 1895 are modern fabrications of Islam Akhun and a few others working with him".
[4]Hoernlé retired after publishing his 1899 report, his reputation survived this revelation, and his obituaries in 1918 tactfully omitted the incident, according to Kirk.
[2] Hoernle also received all material collected by Aurel Stein during his 1st and 2nd expedition to Central Asia, now split between the British Library and the Delhi Museum.
[2][3] In 1920, the Japanese Sanskrit scholar, monk, and later professor at Ōtani University Izumi Hōkei (1884-1947) discovered in a Cambridge bookstore a collection of 431 books from Hoernlé's former possession on Buddhism, medicine, languages, and literature.
