Edward William Lane

Edward William Lane ( born September 17, 1801 in Hereford, † August 10 1876 in Worthing ) was an eminent British orientalist.

Born the son of a canon in Hereford, he went to study in Cambridge, but left the university soon and went to London to become an engraver. When they found him tuberculosis and recommended that the stay in warmer climates him, he traveled to Egypt in 1825. There he devoted himself to the intensive study of the life of the Egyptians and the Arabic language. In 1828 he returned to England and sought in vain a publisher of his travel diary, which he illustrated himself. In 1834, he again traveled to Egypt. In 1838 he published his first important work then Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, which was translated into German in 1852 by Julius Theodor Zenker. This precise and comprehensive description of Egypt was also extremely popular with the English audience. 1840 to 1841 he published an English translation of 1001 night after the first appeared in Bulak Arab pressure. Then he devoted himself to an Arabic- English dictionary. For such studies he stayed from 1842 to 1849 in Egypt again. The Arabic - English Lexicon, he could not finish until his death. It was continued by his nephew Stanley Lane - Poole, and in 1893 finally the last volume was released.