Edward William Lane | |
|---|---|
 Lane in an Egyptian outfit, plaster byRichard James Lane | |
| Born | (1801-09-17)17 September 1801 Hereford, England |
| Died | 10 August 1876(1876-08-10) (aged 74) Broadwater, West Sussex, England |
| Known for | Arabic-English Lexicon |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Oriental studies |
Edward William Lane (17 September 1801 – 10 August 1876) was a Britishorientalist,translator andlexicographer. He is known for hisManners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and theArabic-English Lexicon, as well as his translations ofOne Thousand and One Nights andSelections from theKur-án.[1]
During his lifetime, Lane also wrote a detailed account of Egypt and the country'sancient sites, but the book, titledDescription of Egypt, was published posthumously. It was first published by theAmerican University in Cairo Press in 2000 and has been republished several times since then.[2]
Lane was born atHereford, England, the third son of the Rev. Dr Theophilus Lane, and grand-nephew ofThomas Gainsborough on his mother's side.[3] After his father died in 1814, Lane was sent to grammar school atBath and thenHereford,[4] where he showed a talent for mathematics. He visited Cambridge but did not enrol in any of its colleges.[5]
Instead, Lane joined his brother Richard in London, studying engraving with him. At the same time, Lane began his study ofArabic on his own. However, his health soon deteriorated. For the sake of his health and of a new career, he set sail to Egypt.[6]
Lane had a few reasons for travelling to Egypt. He had been studying Arabic for a long period. There had been an explosion ofegyptomania in England due toBelzoni's exhibition at theEgyptian Hall and the release ofVivant Denon'sTravels in Upper and Lower Egypt during the campaigns of General Bonaparte in that country (1803). Lane's health was also deteriorating while living inLondon and he felt that he needed to migrate to a warmer climate during the harsh winter months. During the 1800s, those who spoke Arabic and were familiar with theNear East could easily apply for jobs serving the British government. Lane set sail for Egypt on 18 July 1825.[7]
Lane arrived inAlexandria in September 1825 and soon left forCairo. He remained in Egypt for two and a half years, mingling with the locals, dressed as a Turk (the ethnicity of the then-dominantOttoman Empire), and taking notes of his experiences and observations. InOld Cairo, he lived near Bab al-Hadid, and studied Arabic with Sheikh Muhammad 'Ayyad al-Tantawi (1810–1861), who was later invited to teach at Saint Petersburg, Russia.[8]
In Egypt, Lane visitedcoffee shops and the houses of locals, attended amosque, and familiarized himself withIslam. He also befriended other British travelers in Egypt at that time, includingJohn Gardner Wilkinson, who had been residing in Cairo. Lane also went on a trip down theNile toNubia, visiting numerous sites and taking observational notes.[9] On this trip he visitedAbydos,Dendera,Luxor,Kom Ombo,Philae,Abu Simbel and a number of other ancient sites.[10] Lane left Egypt on 7 April 1828.[11]
Lane's interest in ancient Egypt may have been first aroused by seeing a presentation byGiovanni Battista Belzoni.[12] His original ambition was to publish an account of what had remained ofAncient Egypt. The London publisherJohn Murray showed early interest in publishing the project (known asDescription of Egypt as an homage to the early 1800s publication,Description de l'Égypte[notes 1]), but then backed out. This rejection was probably due to the fact that the book had detailed accounts of Egypt, numerous illustrations, and texts in Arabic, Ancient Egyptian (hieroglyphics) and Ancient Greek which would significantly raise the cost of printing. Large publications were also going out of fashion and Lane was not himself an established author. Due to financial shortcomings, Lane could not publish the book himself, so it remained unpublished until 2000.[13]
InDescription of Egypt, Lane provided descriptions and histories of locations within Egypt that he had visited. He was a devouturban geographer, best illustrated by the fact that he devoted five chapters of the book writing about everything inCairo: the way the city looks when you approach it, a detailed account ofOld Cairo, monuments in the city, the nature around it, etc.[14] He also wrote about rural areas.[15]
Lane also discussed the landscape and geography of Egypt, including its deserts, theNile and how it was formed, Egyptian agriculture, and the climate.[16] An entire chapter of the book was devoted to apolitical history of Egypt, with specific attention to the history ofMuhammad Ali of Egypt.[17]
Lane'sDescription of Egypt focuses mainly onAncient Egypt. Though Lane was not credited as such during his lifetime, his text follows the form ofEgyptology. The book included a supplement titledOn the Ancient Egyptians in which Lane discusses the origin and physical characteristics of Egyptians, the origin of their civilization,hieroglyphics,Ancient Egyptian religion and law, Egyptian priesthood, Egyptian royalty, the caste system, general manners and customs, sacred architecture and sculpture, agriculture, and commerce.[18] In a letter he wrote to his friend Harriet Martineau, Lane stated that he felt the need to put a lot of effort into staying away from Ancient Egypt; he added that in the previous eight years he could not read a book on the subject as it fascinated him so much that it drew his attention away from his work.[19]
Lane spent 32 days at theGiza pyramid complex, drawing, making sketches, and taking notes for his work.[20] At the complex Lane noted that he saw labourers pulling down some of the stone from theGreat Sphinx of Giza to use it for modern buildings.[21] He stayed at theValley of the Kings for 15 days, sleeping in the tomb ofRamses X, and left detailed accounts of each tomb, concluding that there may be further hidden tombs within the Valley.[22]
160 illustrations accompanied Lane's accounts.[23]
_-_TIMEA.jpg)
Since Lane had trouble publishing hisDescription of Egypt, at the suggestion of John Murray he expanded a chapter of the original project into a separate book. The result was hisManners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), published by theSociety for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The work was partly modelled onAlexander Russell'sThe Natural History of Aleppo (1756).[24] Lane visited Egypt again in 1833 in order to collect materials to expand and revise the work, after the Society had accepted the publication.[25] The book became a bestseller (still in print), and Lane earned his reputation in the field of Orientalism.
Lane left detailed accounts of everyday life in Egypt in the 19th century, which would prove useful to later researchers.Arthur John Arberry visited Egypt a century after Lane and said that it was like visiting another planet - none of the things Lane had written about were present.[26]
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.[27]
However, in order to gain further information, he would later send for his sister,Sophia Lane Poole, so that she could gain access to women-only areas such as hareems and bathhouses and report on what she found.[2] The result wasThe 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 within the publication.)The Englishwoman in Egypt contains large sections of Lane's own unpublished work, altered so that it appears to be from Poole's perspective (for example "my brother" being substituted for "I").[28] However, it also relates Poole's own experiences in visiting the hareems that were closed to male visitors.
Lane's next major project was a translation of theOne Thousand and One Nights. His version first saw light as a monthly serial from 1838 to 1840, and was published in three volumes in 1840. A revised edition was released in 1859. The encyclopedic annotations from the first edition were published posthumously and separately in 1883 by his great-nephewStanley Lane-Poole, asArabian Society in the Middle Ages.[29] Lane's version isbowdlerized, and illustrated byWilliam Harvey.
Opinions vary on the quality of Lane's translation.Stanley Lane-Poole commented that "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."[30] Nights researcher and authorRobert Irwin writes that 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."[31]
Lane himself saw theNights as an edifying work, as he had expressed earlier in a note in his preface to theManners 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.[32]
From 1842 onwards, Lane devoted himself to the monumentalArabic-English Lexicon, although he found time to contribute several articles to the journal ofDeutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft.[33] He went to Egypt in 1842 with his wife, two children, and his sisterSophia Lane Poole who was working on her bookThe Englishwoman in Egypt.[34] On this occasion Lane stayed in Egypt for 7 years, working six days a week on his Lexicon.[35] A local scholar, Ibrahim al-Disqui, helped him with this work. Al-Disqui assisted in locating manuscripts and proofreading these manuscripts for Lane. The two became close during this period and continued to stay friends after they finished the Lexicon.[36]
According to Manfred Ullmann,[37] Lane’s dictionary was of extremely poor quality, as he explained:
The Arabic-English Lexicon [sc. by E. Lane] is the work of an autodidact and private scholar, who did not have any knowledge of the Arabic literature worth mentioning. … Lane clearly never read the dīwān (collection) of any poet, nor any prose work apart from the Arabian Nights. … The work … stops with the letter qāf. … But even the volumes comprising the letters alif to fāʾ are incomplete, since Lane omitted unusual roots and words, which he planned to supply in a ‘second part’, which never appeared. … In the end, Lane’s Lexicon is only a Tāǧ al-ʿarūs translated into English. … He simply copied exactly — but without any critical discernment — the materials found in the Arabic dictionaries; he omitted the grammatical construction of the verbs; and he failed to provide references to the literary sources. This means that Lane’s dictionary marks a significant step backwards compared with the works of his predecessors [sc. such as Golius and Freytag].
Lane'sSelections from theQur'an 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 with his family collecting materials for theArabic-English Lexicon when it was being printed.[38]
Lane was unable to complete his dictionary. He had arrived at the letterQāf, the 21st letter of the Arabic alphabet, but in 1876 he died atWorthing,Sussex. Lane's great-nephewStanley Lane-Poole finished the work based on his incomplete notes and published it in the twenty years following his death.[39]
In 1854, an anonymous work entitledThe Genesis of the Earth and of Man was published, edited by Lane's nephewReginald Stuart Poole. The work is attributed by some to Lane.[33]
The part concerning Cairo's early history and topography inDescription of Egypt, based onAl-Maqrizi's work and Lane's own observations, was revised by Reginald Stuart Poole in 1847 and published in 1896 asCairo Fifty Years Ago.[40]
Lane has been criticized for his particularly unsympathetic description of Egypt'sCoptic Christian minority, drawn in part from the words of an Egyptian man who presented himself to Lane as a Copt, although other scholars have reported that the interlocutor was, in fact, a Muslim.[41] In his writings, he describes Copts as "of a sullen temper, extremely avaricious, and abominable dissemblers; cringing or domineering according to circumstances.[42] Scholars such asS.H. Leeder have described "a great deal of the morbid prejudice against the Copts" as being inspired by the writings of Lane.[43]
Lane was from a notable Orientalist family. His sister,Sophia Lane Poole, was an Oriental scholar, as was his nephewReginald Stuart Poole. His brother,Richard James Lane, was a notable Victorian-era engraver and lithographer known for his portraits. 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.[2] In 1867, after the death of his sister's son Edward Stanley Poole, she and Lane raised his three orphaned children, a daughter and two sons,Stanley Lane-Poole (also an orientalist and archaeologist) andReginald Lane Poole (a historian and archivist).[44]
Lane died on 10 August 1876 and was buried atWest Norwood Cemetery. His manuscripts and drawings are in the archive of theGriffith Institute,University of Oxford.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
