1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hyde, Thomas

HYDE, THOMAS (1636–1703), English Orientalist, was born at Billingsley, near Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, on the 29th of June 1636. He inherited his taste for linguistic studies, and received his first lessons in some of the Eastern tongues, from his father, who was rector of the parish. In his sixteenth year Hyde entered King’s College, Cambridge, where, under Wheelock, professor of Arabic, he made rapid progress in Oriental languages, so that, after only one year of residence, he was invited to London to assist Brian Walton in his edition of the Polyglott Bible. Besides correcting the Arabic, Persic and Syriac texts for that work, Hyde transcribed into Persic characters the Persian translation of the Pentateuch, which had been printed in Hebrew letters at Constantinople in 1546. To this work, which Archbishop Ussher had thought well-nigh impossible even for a native of Persia, Hyde appended the Latin version which accompanies it in the Polyglott. In 1658 he was chosen Hebrew reader at Queen’s College, Oxford, and in 1659, in consideration of his erudition in Oriental tongues, he was admitted to the degree of M.A. In the same year he was appointed under-keeper of the Bodleian Library, and in 1665 librarian-in-chief. Next year he was collated to a prebend at Salisbury, and in 1673 to the archdeaconry of Gloucester, receiving the degree of D.D. shortly afterwards. In 1691 the death of Edward Pococke opened up to Hyde the Laudian professorship of Arabic; and in 1697, on the deprivation of Roger Altham, he succeeded to the regius chair of Hebrew and a canonry of Christ Church. Under Charles II., James II. and William III. Hyde discharged the duties of Eastern interpreter to the court. Worn out by his unremitting labours, he resigned his librarianship in 1701, and died at Oxford on the 18th of February 1703. Hyde, who was one of the first to direct attention to the vast treasures of Oriental antiquity, was an excellent classical scholar, and there was hardly an Eastern tongue accessible to foreigners with which he was not familiar. He had even acquired Chinese, while his writings are the best testimony to his mastery of Turkish, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Hebrew and Malay.

In his chief work, Historia religionis veterum Persarum (1700), he made the first attempt to correct from Oriental sources the errors of the Greek and Roman historians who had described the religion of the ancient Persians. His other writings and translations comprise Tabulae longitudinum et latitudinum stellarum fixarum ex observatione principis Ulugh Beighi (1665), to which his notes have given additional value; Quatuor evangelia et acta apostolorum lingua Malaica, caracteribus Europaeis (1677); Epistola de mensuris et ponderibus serum sive sinensium (1688), appended to Bernard’s De mensuris et ponderibus antiquis; Abraham Peritsol itinera mundi (1691); and De ludis orientalibus libri II. (1694).

With the exception of the Historia religionis, which was republished by Hunt and Costard in 1760, the writings of Hyde, including some unpublished MSS., were collected and printed by Dr Gregory Sharpe in 1767 under the title Syntagma dissertationum quas olim . . . Thomas Hyde separatim edidit. There is a life of the author prefixed. Hyde also published a catalogue of the Bodleian Library in 1674.