Heinrich Lüders

Heinrich Lüders (1869–1943) was a leading German Indologist and philologist, holding professorships at Rostock and Kiel before joining the University of Berlin, where he became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and one of the central figures in German Indological scholarship of the early 20th century. His work spanned Sanskrit and Prakrit philology, Indian epigraphy (including major studies of Aśokan inscriptions), and Buddhist manuscript studies, with particular expertise in editing and interpreting fragmentary Sanskrit and Central Asian manuscripts recovered from Silk Road sites such as Turfan. He remained active in Berlin through the difficult final years of his career under the Nazi regime, continuing his scholarship until his death in 1943.