Charles Rockwell Lanman

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Charles Rockwell Lanman (July 8, 1850–February 20, 1941) was an American scholar of the Sanskrit language.

He was born in Norwich, Connecticut, graduated from Yale University in 1871, was a graduate student there (1871-1873) under James Hadley and WD Whitney, and in Germany (1873-1876) studied Sanskrit under Weber and Roth and philology under Georg Curtius and August Leskien.

He was professor of Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 to 1880 and subsequently at Harvard University. In 1889 he travelled in India and bought for Harvard University Sanskrit and Prakrit books and manuscripts, which, with those subsequently bequeathed to the university by Fitzedward Hall, make the most valuable collection of its kind in America, and made possible the Harvard Oriental Series, edited by Lanman.

From 1879 to 1884 he was secretary and editor of the Transactions, and in 1889-1890 president of the American Philological Association, and in 1884-1894 he was corresponding secretary of the American Oriental Society, from 1897 to 1907 vice-president, and in 1907-1908 president.

In the Harvard Oriental Series he translated (vol. iv.) into English Rajacekhara's Karpura-Majari (1900), a Prakrit drama, and (vols. vii and viii) revised and edited Whitney's translation of, and notes on, the Atharva-Veda Samhit (2 vols, 1905); he published A Sanskrit Reader, with Vocabulary and Notes (2 vols, 1884-1888); and he wrote on early Hindu pantheism and contributed the section on Brahmanism to Messages of the World's Religions.