Edward William Lane
Encyclopedia
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
Orientalist
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
, translator
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
and lexicographer.
Lane was the third son of the Rev. Dr Theopilus Lane, and grandnephew of Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter.-Suffolk:Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. He was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woolen goods. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his penciling skills so that he let...
on his mother's side. After his father's death in 1814, Lane was sent to grammar school at Bath and then Hereford, where he showed a talent for mathematics. He visited Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
, but did not enroll in any of its colleges.
Instead, Lane joined his brother Richard in London, studying engraving with him. At the same time Lane began his study of Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
on his own. However, his health soon deteriorated. For the sake of his health and of a new career, he set sail to Egypt.
Egypt
He arrived in AlexandriaAlexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
in September 1825, and soon left for Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
. He remained in Egypt for two and a half years, mingling with the locals, dressed as a Turk (the ethnicity of the then-dominant Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
) and taking notes of everything he saw and heard. In Old Cairo
Old Cairo
Old Cairo is a part of Cairo, Egypt, that contains the remnants of those cities which were capitals before Cairo, such as Fustat, as well as some other elements from the city's varied history. For example, it encompasses Coptic Cairo and its many old churches and ruins of Roman fortifications...
, he lived near Bab al-Hadid, and studied Arabic, among others, with Sheikh Muhammad 'Ayyad al-Tantawi (1810–1861), who was later invited to teach at Saint Petersburg, Russia. He returned to England with his voluminous notes in the autumn of 1828.
Lane's interest in ancient Egypt may have been first aroused by seeing a presentation by Giovanni Battista Belzoni
Giovanni Battista Belzoni
Giovanni Battista Belzoni , sometimes known as The Great Belzoni, was a prolific Venetian explorer of Egyptian antiquities.-Early life:...
. His original ambition was to publish an account of what had remained of Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
. The London publisher John Murray
John Murray (1778-1843)
John Murray was a Scottish publisher and member of the famous John Murray publishing house.The publishing house was founded by Murray's father, who died when Murray was only fifteen years old. During his youth, a partner, Samuel Highley, ran the business, but in 1803 the partnership was dissolved...
showed early interest in publishing the mighty project (known as Description of Egypt), but then retracted. At the suggestion of Murray, Lane expanded a chapter of the original project into a whole book. The result was his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge , founded in 1826, and wound up in 1848, was a Whiggish London organisation that published inexpensive texts intended to adapt scientific and similarly high-minded material for the rapidly expanding reading public...
. The work was partly modeled on Alexander Russell's The Natural History of Aleppo (1756). Lane visited Egypt again, in order to collect materials to expand and revise the work, after the society accepted the publication. The book became a bestseller (still in print), and won Lane a reputation.
Lane was conscious that his research was handicapped by the fact that gender segregation prevented him from getting a close-up view of Egyptian women - an aspect of Egyptian life that was of particular interest to his readers. He was forced to rely on information passed on by Egyptian men, as he explains:
Many husbands of the middle classes, and some of the higher orders, freely talk of the affairs of the ḥareem with one who professes to agree with them in their general moral sentiments, if they have not to converse through the medium of an interpreter.However, in order to gain further information, years later he would send for his sister, Sophia Lane Poole
Sophia Lane Poole
Sophia Lane Poole was the author of The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, written during a residence there in 1842, 3 & 4, with E.W...
, so that she could gain access to women-only areas such as hareems and bathhouses and report on what she found. The result was The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, written during a residence there in 1842, 3 & 4, with E.W. Lane Esq., Author of "The Modern Egyptians" By His Sister. (Poole’s own name does not appear.) The Englishwoman in Egypt contains large sections of Lane's own unpublished work, altered so that it appears from Poole's perspective (for example "my brother" being substituted for "I"). However, it also relates Poole's own experiences in visiting the hareems that were closed to male visitors such as her brother.
1001 Nights
Lane's next major project was a translation of the One Thousand and One Nights. His version first saw light in monthly parts in the years 1838 to 1840, and was published in three volumes in 1840. A revised edition came out in 1859. The encyclopedic annotations were published, after his death, separately in 1883 by his great-nephew Stanley Lane-PooleStanley Lane-Poole
Stanley Lane-Poole was a British orientalist and archaeologist. His uncle was Edward William Lane.Born in London, England, from 1874 to 1892 he worked in the British Museum, and after that in Egypt researching on Egyptian archaeology...
, as Arabian Society in the Middle Ages. Lane's version is bowdlerized, and illustrated by William Harvey
William Harvey (artist)
William Harvey was an English engraver and designer.Born at Newcastle upon Tyne, Harvey was the son of a bath-keeper. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to Thomas Bewick, and became one of his favorite pupils. Bewick describes him as one "who both as an engraver & designer, stands preeminent" at...
.
Opinions vary on the quality of Lane's translation. One comments, "... Lane's version is markedly superior to any other that has appeared in English, if superiority is allowed to be measured by accuracy and an honest and unambitious desire to reproduce the authentic spirit as well as the letter of the original." Yet another, "... [Lane's] style tends towards the grandiose and mock-biblical... Word order is frequently and pointlessly inverted. Where the style is not pompously high-flown, it is often painfully and uninspiringly literal... It is also peppered with Latinisms."
Lane himself saw the Nights as an edifying work, as he had expressed earlier in a note in his preface to the Manners and Customs,
There is one work, however, which represents most admirable pictures of the manners and customs of the Arabs, and particularly of those of the Egyptians; it is 'The Thousand and One Nights; or, Arabian Nights' Entertainments:' if the English reader had possessed a close translation of it with sufficient illustrative notes, I might almost have spared myself the labour of the present undertaking.
Marriage
In 1840, Lane married Nafeesah, a Greek-Egyptian woman who had originally been either presented to him or purchased by him as a slave when she was around eight years old, and whom he had undertaken to educate.Dictionary and other works
From 1842 onwards, Lane devoted himself to the monumental Arabic-English LexiconArabic-English Lexicon
The Arabic–English Lexicon is a 19th-century Arabic dictionary compiled by the British Orientalist Edward William Lane. Writing in 1998, a critic says, "Every serious classical Arabic scholar, for the last hundred years and more, has been indebted to Lane's work [the Lexicon]."In 1842, Lane, who...
, although he found time to contribute several articles to the journal of Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft
The Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft , in English the German Oriental Society, is a scholarly organization dedicated to studies of Asia and the broader Orient....
.
Lane's Selections from the Kur-án
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
appeared in 1843. It was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Moreover, it was misprint-ridden, as Lane was for the third time in Egypt, along with his wife, sister and two nephews, to collect materials for the planned dictionary, the Arabic-English Lexicon
Arabic-English Lexicon
The Arabic–English Lexicon is a 19th-century Arabic dictionary compiled by the British Orientalist Edward William Lane. Writing in 1998, a critic says, "Every serious classical Arabic scholar, for the last hundred years and more, has been indebted to Lane's work [the Lexicon]."In 1842, Lane, who...
, when it was passing through the press.
Lane was unable to complete the dictionary. He had arrived at the letter Qāf
Qoph
Qoph or Qop is the nineteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its sound value is an emphatic or . The OHED gives the letter Qoph a transliteration value of Q or a K and a final transliteration value as a ck...
, the 21st letter of the Arabic alphabet, when he died in 1876. Lane's great-nephew Stanley Lane-Poole
Stanley Lane-Poole
Stanley Lane-Poole was a British orientalist and archaeologist. His uncle was Edward William Lane.Born in London, England, from 1874 to 1892 he worked in the British Museum, and after that in Egypt researching on Egyptian archaeology...
finished the work based on his incomplete notes and published it in the twenty years following his death.
In 1854, an anonymous work entitled The Genesis of the Earth and of Man was published, edited by Lane's nephew Reginald Stuart Poole. The work is attributed by some to Lane.
The part concerning Cairo's early history and topography in Description of Egypt, based on Al-Maqrizi
Al-Maqrizi
Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi ; Arabic: , was an Egyptian historian more commonly known as al-Maqrizi or Makrizi...
's work and Lane's own observations, was revised by Reginald Stuart Poole in 1847 and published in 1896 as Cairo Fifty Years Ago. The whole Description of Egypt was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2000.
He died on 10 August 1876 and was buried at West Norwood Cemetery
West Norwood Cemetery
West Norwood Cemetery is a cemetery in West Norwood in London, England. It was also known as the South Metropolitan Cemetery.One of the first private landscaped cemeteries in London, it is one of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries of London, and is a site of major historical, architectural and...
.
Footnotes and References
- Arberry, A.J. (1960). Oriental Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin.
- Irwin, Robert (1994). The Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Allen Lane.
- Irwin, Robert (2006). For Lust of Knowing. London: Allen Lane.
- Lane, Edward William (1973 [1860]). An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. With a new introduction by John Manchip White. New York: Dover Publications.
- Roper, Geoffrey (1998). "Texts from Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Role of E. W. Lane", in Paul and Janet Starky (eds) Travellers in Egypt, London; New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 244–254.
- Thompson, Jason (1996). "Edward William Lane's 'Description of Egypt'". International Journal Of Middle East Studies, 28 (4): 565-583.
Biographies of Edward William Lane
- Ahmed, Leila (1978). Edward W Lane. London: Longman.
- Lane-Poole, Stanley (1877). Life of Edward William Lane. London: Williams and Norgate.
External Links
- Lane's Arabic-English lexicon in the DjVuDjVuDjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy...
fileformat: Downloadable At Archive.org In Eight Parts. Each part is about 20 megabytes. See also the related copyright details. - Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, ا