Rudolf Ernst Brünnow


Rudolf Ernst Brünnow was a German-American orientalist and philologist.

Life

The son of the Berlin-born astronomer Franz Friedrich Ernst Brünnow, Rudolf Ernst was born during the period his father was living in the United States. In 1863 the father and son returned to Europe. In 1882 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg.
In 1897 and 1898, Brünnow and Alfred von Domaszewski, took two trips together to Arabia to gain new insights into the former Roman province Arabia Petraea. They surveyed the site at Petra and made the first modern map of this former capital of the Nabatean empire.
In 1910 Brünnow was appointed the chair of Semitic Languages at Princeton. In addition to the German and English languages he mastered French, ancient Greek, Latin, Turkish and Assyrian.

Works