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William Robertson Smith
Image: Contemporary photograph, photographer unknown, Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

William Robertson Smith

وليم روبرتسون سميث

Notable figure 1846–1894 · Source: Yahya Murad, Muʿjam asmaʾ al-mustashriqin (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), p. 689 · Second source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, authority record: Smith, William Robertson (1846-1894)

Field: Philology and Semitics

Affiliation

Cambridge professor of Arabic; reviser of Wright's grammar

Biography

A Scot, he studied Arabic at Edinburgh and then at European universities, and succeeded William Wright in the chair of Arabic at Cambridge (1889). Between 1879 and 1881 he travelled through Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz as far as Jidda and al-Taʾif. He wrote on kinship and marriage in early Arabia and on the religion of the Semites (1889), and with de Goeje revised the third edition of Wright's Grammar of the Arabic Language, published after his death (1896–1898).