F. Max Müller

Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) was a German-born philologist and Orientalist who spent his career at Oxford. The son of the poet Wilhelm Müller, he studied Sanskrit in Leipzig, Berlin and Paris and came to England in 1846 to edit the Rig Veda from the manuscripts of the East India Company, a task that occupied him for a quarter of a century. Oxford made him professor of comparative philology, and from 1879 he directed the fifty volumes of The Sacred Books of the East. His lectures on language, mythology and religion, including India: What Can It Teach Us?, made him the founder of the comparative study of religion in Britain.