É. Apor (ed.): Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection, 1951–1976. Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
É. Apor: Sándor Kégl' s Bequest and the Persian Manuscripts in the Oriental Collection
35 É. APOR SÁNDOR KÉGL'S BEQUEST AND THE PERSIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ORIENTAL COLLECTION "He was an Orientalist in the strictest sense of the word, if by the term Orientalist we understand a scholar who has chosen as his field of researph the intellectual traditions of Oriental man in order to study and to publicize — through academic studies firmly grounded in philological investigation — the influence which the Oriental world has had on the intellectual development of mankind in general, " [1] Sándor Kégl died in the last days of the year 1920. He had been a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a titular public Professor Extraordinary at Budapest University. As a young man he had been appointed to the post of honorary lecturer in Persian Language and Literature at Budapest University and in 1906, at the age of 44, he became a corresponding member of the Academy on the recommendation of Ármin Vámbéry, himself an honorary member, and Ignác Kunos, alsoa corresponding member. He completed his studies under the direction of such scholars as Ignác Goldziher and Ármin Vámbéry, with both of whom a cordial pupil-teacher relationship developed into a close personal friendship. We read of their close relationship in a letter from Vámbéry dated 1890. addressee unknown. [2] "My Dear Friend, I am sending you a paper which I can warmly recommend both to you and to the Academy. As its title indicates, its subject is modern Persian literature and it is written by a former student of mine, Dr. Sándor Kégl. Dr. Kégl comes of a well-known and well-to-do family. For four years he studied Oriental languages under my supervision and at the completion of his studies here I arranged for him to be sent to Persia. Dr. Kégl spent some time in the Persian capital where he richly supplemented his theoretical knowledge with practical experience. On his return home he began writing the present study, of which, now that it is completed, I can unreservedly say that it is worthy of publication. I honestly believe that no other European academic could have produced a work quite like Dr. Kégl's, no, not even Dr. Ethé despite his unique reputation, because he has been working from sources which nobody before him had investigated.
