Oriental philologist, born at Leschnitz, in Upper Silesia, on the 7th of January 1822. After studying at Berlin under Bopp, Böckh and Lachmann, he settled there in 1850, and devoted himself to Sanskrit and the old German tongues. To this time of his life belongs his collaboration with Kirchoff in the publication of Umbrische Sprachdenkmäler (2 vols.; Berlin, 1849–51),—an epoch-making work in the comparative study of the languages of ancient Italy,—as well as the founding of the well-known Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung (1852), in the editing of which he assisted A. Kuhn for some time. In 1852 he went to Oxford, where he helped Max Müller in his edition of the Rigveda, and was appointed to a place in the Bodleian Library, the fruit of which was his excellent Catalogus codicum Sanscritorum bibliothecæ Bodleianæ Oxoniensis (1864). In 1862 he became professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Edinburgh, and in 1875 resigned this chair for one at Bonn. Aufrecht has published scholarly editions of several classical Sanskrit works, the most important being his Rigveda, in the Roman character (2d ed., 2 vols.; Bonn, 1877), and his Catalogus Catalogorum, in 1891.
