Franz Anton Schiefner (June 18, 1817 – November 16, 1879) was a Baltic German linguist and tibetologist. Schiefner was born to a German-speaking family in Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, then part of Russian Empire. His father was a merchant who had emigrated from Bohemia. He was educated first at the Reval grammar school, matriculated at St Petersburg as a law student in 1836, and subsequently at Berlin, from 1840 to 1842, where he devoted himself exclusively to studies of Eastern languages. On his return to St Petersburg in 1843 he taught classics in the First Grammar School, and soon afterwards received a post in the Imperial Academy, where in 1852 the cultivation of the Tibetan language and literature was assigned to him as a special function. From 1860 to 1873 he simultaneously held the pro