Walter Bruno Henning

Walter Bruno Henning (August 26, 1908—January 8, 1967) was a scholar of Middle Iranian languages and literature, especially of the corpus discovered by the Turpan expeditions of the early 20th century.

Biography

Walter Henning was born in Ragnit, then in East Prussia, but grew up in Köslin, in Pommerania on the Baltic coast.

Henning initially attended the University of Göttingen to study mathematics, and although he would soon<!-- within a year--> choose to study Iranian languages instead, he would maintain an interest in mathematics for the rest of his life. At Göttingen, Henning was&mdash;together with Walther Hinz, Kai Barr and Hans Jakob Polotzky&mdash;among the last group of students of Friedrich Carl Andreas, chairman of the faculty for West-Asian languages<!-- Lehrstuhl für Westasiatische Sprachen -->, acknowledged authority on Middle Iranian literature and guiding force behind the analysis of the Turpan manuscripts.

In 1931, Henning received a Ph.D. summa cum laude for his study of the Middle Iranian verb as it appeared in the Turpan collection. In 1932, the Prussian Academy of Sciences appointed Henning editor of the Manichaean manuscripts of that collection, for which Henning shifted to Berlin.

Between 1932-1936, Henning completed several studies that Andreas had begun, the results of which were published as the 3-volume Mitteliranische Manichaica aus Chinesisch-Türkestan. Independently of Andreas' Nachlass, Henning published Ein......
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