August Ferdinand Mehren

Who was August Ferdinand Mehren?

August Ferdinand Mehren was a Danish Orientalist and philologist who was a native of Helsingør.

He studied at the Universities of Copenhagen, Leipzig and Kiel, obtaining his doctorate in 1845. In Leipzig he was a student of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, and in Kiel he studied under Justus Olshausen. In 1854 he became a professor of Semitic languages at the University of Copenhagen.

In his academic work, Mehren largely focused on Arabic poetry and prose. In 1853 he published a major work on Arab rhetoric and linguistics titled Die Rhetorik der Araber, and two decades later, translated into French the cosmography of the Syrian geographer Muhammed al-Dimashqi towards a book called Manuel de la cosmographie du moyen age.

With Prof. Olshausen and Danish philologist Niels Ludvig Westergaard, he was responsible for cataloging Avestan manuscripts into a collection called Codices Orientales Bibliothecae Regiae Havniensis. Towards the end of his career, Mehren published a handful of books involving the philosophical and mystical writings of Avicenna.