Vasily Radlov
German-born Russian turkologist and ethnographer (1837-1918)
Vasily Vasilievich Radlov (Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Ра́длов), born Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff (17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1837 – 12 May 1918) was a German and Russian linguist, ethnographer, and archaeologist, often considered to be the founder of Turkology, the scientific study of Turkic peoples. He was the first to publish the Orhon inscriptions (though he did not succeed in deciphering them).
Career
Radlov studied at the University of Berlin (1854–58) and attended lectures by August Friedrich Pott at the University of Halle. His teachers included Carl Ritter, Heymann Steinthal, and Wilhelm Schott. In 1858, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “On the Influence of Religion on the Peoples of Asia,” at the University of Jena.
That summer, he arrived in St. Petersburg to study Uralic and Altaic languages and started working at the Asiatic Museum. In 1859, he passed examinations at the St. Petersburg University examination committee to qualify as a German language teacher in gymnasiums. That same year, he took an oath of allegiance to the Russian tsar and became a Russian subject.
The public source identifies “Vasily Radlov” as german-born Russian turkologist and ethnographer (1837-1918). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Vasily, Radlov and German-born.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q302970. VIAF identifies the subject as 41890397. The Library of Congress control number is n82276286. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1918, 1854 and 1858.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vasily Radlov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.