August Ferdinand Mehren
August Ferdinand Mehren (6 April 1822 – 14 November 1907) was a Danish scholar who studied and wrote about the languages, poetry, and cultures of the Middle East. He was born in Helsingør to a merchant family and studied at the University of Copenhagen, as well as in Leipzig and Kiel, earning his doctorate in 1845. In Leipzig he learned from Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, and in Kiel from Justus Olshausen.
In 1854 he became a professor of Semitic languages at the University of Copenhagen, later teaching Semitic-Eastern philology until his retirement in 1898. Mehren’s work focused mainly on Arabic poetry and prose. He published Die Rhetorik der Araber in 1853, a major study of Arabic rhetoric and language. In 1874 he translated the cosmography of the Syrian geographer al-Dimashqi into French, and in 1866 he published Cosmographie de Schem’s Eddin Dimasqui (with a French translation in 1874). He spent the winter of 1867–68 in Egypt to study Arabic more deeply.
Together with Justus Olshausen and Niels Ludvig Westergaard, he helped catalog Avestan manuscripts into a collection called Codices Orientales Bibliothecae Regiae Havniensis. Later in his career he wrote about Avicenna’s philosophy and mystical writings.
Mehren received several honors. He was made a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog in 1869, promoted to Dannebrogsmand in 1887, and promoted to Commander of the 2nd and then the 1st degree in 1892 and 1898, respectively. He died in Fredensborg in 1907 and was buried in Helsingør.
He married Johanne Sophie Charlotte Justine Daue in 1849. A portrait by Andreas Hunæus exists, and he is featured in Peder Severin Krøyer’s 1897 painting A Meeting in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He spent his final years in Fredensborg after retirement.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:55 (CET).