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Sir William Hay Macnaghten
Image: Lowes Cato Dickinson, after Vincent Eyre, Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Sir William Hay Macnaghten

وليم هاي ماكناغتن

Notable figure 1793–1841 · Source: Yahya Murad, Muʿjam asmaʾ al-mustashriqin (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), p. 1019 · Second source: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, authority record: Macnaghten, William H. (1793-1841)

From the United Kingdom; worked in India

Field: Text editing

Affiliation

Editor of the Arabic Nights, Calcutta II (1839–42)

Biography

He went out to Madras in 1809 and served in Bengal from 1816, mastering Arabic and Persian and rising to senior office in the Calcutta government. He published the complete Arabic text of the Thousand and One Nights from an Egyptian manuscript in four volumes (Calcutta, 1839–1842), the edition known as Calcutta II, on which most later translators relied.