'Born in 1909 in Hannover, Germany, Carl Georg Christoph von Brandenstein began recording Australian languages in the 1960s in the Pilbara. Over the next 30 years he also recorded information about Ngadjumaya from the south-east of Western Australia and Noongar in the south-west. After high school (Gymnasium) in Gera and Weimar, Carl went to study at Berlin University (1928–34) where he trained as an orientalist and historian of religion. He then studied at Leipzig (1938–39), where his doctorate, granted in 1940, was a study of the iconography of Hittite gods (Brandenstein 1943). He worked at the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin from 1934 to 1938 and continued to publish in this area.' (Introduction)