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Johann Heinrich Hottinger
Image: Unknown author; Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Johann Heinrich Hottinger

يوهان هاينريش هوتينغر

Notable figure 1620–1667 · Source: Johann Fück, Tarikh harakat al-istishraq (Die arabischen Studien in Europa), trans. ʿUmar Lutfi al-ʿAlim, 2nd ed., Dar al-Madar al-Islami, Beirut 2001, p. ٩٥–٩٦ · Second source: Deutsche Biographie (NDB 9, 1972, pp. 656 f., by Rudolf Pfister; ADB): Hottinger, Johann Heinrich (1620–1667), GND 104286547

From Switzerland; worked in Germany and the Netherlands

Field: Cataloguing

Affiliation

Made Europe's first bibliography of Arabic letters (1658)

Biography

Born in Zürich, he was introduced to Arabic by Matthias Pasor at Groningen and studied it further under Golius at Leiden. He taught in Zürich, then at Heidelberg as professor of Old Testament and Oriental languages from 1655 to 1661. He was the first to work on Arabic bibliography and literary history: his Promptuarium (1658) has a long chapter on Arabic books, a list of 261 Arabic manuscripts of the Escorial and samples from Ibn Khallikan, and he first made Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist closely known.