Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen

Bunsen was born at Korbach, an old town in the German principality of Waldeck. His father was a farmer who was driven by poverty to become a soldier.[1] Having studied at the Korbach gymnasium (a type of superior state grammar school) and Marburg University, Bunsen went in his nineteenth year to Göttingen, where he studied philosophy under Christian Gottlob Heyne, and supported himself by teaching and later by acting as tutor to William Backhouse Astor, John Jacob’s son. Bunsen had been recommended to Astor by Heyne.[2] He won the university prize essay of the year 1812 with his treatise De Iure Atheniensium Hœreditario[3] (“Athenian Law of Inheritance”), and a few months later the University of Jena granted him the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy.[4]

During 1813 he traveled extensively with Astor in Germany and Italy.[4][2] On his return to Göttingen, he and his friends formed the nucleus of a philological and philosophical society, and he pursued a vast system of kindred studies, including Semitic and Sanskrit philology.[5][2] He studied the religion, laws, language, and literature of the Teutonic races, perfecting his knowledge of the Scandinavian languages on a visit to Denmark and Sweden. He had read Hebrew when a boy, and now worked at Arabic at Munich, Persian at Leiden, and Norse at Copenhagen. At Vienna he met Friedrich von Schlegel; at Munich, Schelling and Thiersch; and he joined the latter in studying Persian, and read law with Feuerbach.