German scholar of Arabic, Aramaic, and Syriac. Born on 20 July 1845 in Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, Sachau began studying Near-Eastern languages at Kiel and Leipzig in 1863. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1867, he studied in Oxford and London. In 1869, he was appointed professor of Semitic languages in Vienna; beginning in 1876, he was professor of Near-Eastern literature in Berlin. In addition, between 1887 and 1920, he was the first director of the Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin, which provided language training to public officers in the East, even though he himself did not teach there. To prepare them for their interaction with the Muslim inhabitants of the newly acquired German colonies in East Africa, he wrote his Muhammedanisches Recht nach schafiitischer Lehre (3rd ed. 1897). In 1878–79, he traveled on behalf of the Prussian government to Syria and Mesopotamia, where he was able to acquire many Syriac mss. for the library of Berlin. Sachau himself described these mss., along with the previously acquired mss. in Berlin, in a comprehensive catalogue published in 1899. He returned to the Middle East in 1897–98. He wrote extensive and very readable reports describing both of his trips to the Middle East. The main fields of his scholarly interest included Arabic, Syriac, the epigraphy of earlier dialects of Aramaic, and Neo-Aramaic. In addition to Arabic works (by al-Jawāliqī, al-Bīrūnī, and Ibn Saʿd), he edited a number of Syriac sources, including several recensions of the Syro-Roman Lawbook (1880 [Syriac, Armenian, Arabic], 1907) as well as lawbooks of E.-Syr. patriarchs and bishops (1907–14). In his capacity as professor at Berlin University and well-connected to the German authorities, he was among the leading German scholars of Near-Eastern Studies of his day, even though personally he was not highly esteemed by all of his academic colleagues. He died in Berlin, Charlottenburg on 17 Sept. 1930.