William Wright (17 January 1830 – 22 May 1889) was a famous British Orientalist, and Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge. Many of his works on Syriac literature are still in print and of considerable scholarly value, especially the catalogues of the holdings of the British Library and Cambridge University Library. A Grammar of The Arabic Language, often simply known as Wright's Grammar, continues to be a popular book with students of Arabic.[1] Wright is also remembered for the Short history of Syriac literature.
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Wright was educated at St Andrew's University, Halle and Leiden. He was Professor of Arabic at University College London from 1855 to 1856, and Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin from 1856 to 1861. From 1861 to 1869 he was an Assistant in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum, and from 1869 to 1870 Assistant Keeper at the museum. In 1870 he was appointed Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, and he held the chair there until his death in 1889.[2]
His early publications of Syriac material appeared in the Journal of Sacred Literature in the 1860s. These included the publication of the Syriac text of An ancient Syrian martyrology in the October 1865 issue. He also took part in the debates about the allegations by the forger Simonides that the Codex Sinaiticus discovered by Constantin von Tischendorf was in fact a fake.
He then went on to publish texts and translations of various works listed below. He also translated and edited Caspari's Grammar of the Arabic Language (2 vols., London, 1859–62); collected and edited Opuscula Arabica (Leyden, 1859)
His main achievement was as a cataloguer of manuscript collections. The rich Syriac holdings of the British Museum (now in the British Library) were mainly obtained in the 1840s from the monastery of Deir al'Syriani in the Nitrian desert in Egypt and contained a large number of previously unknown texts. Wright's catalogue included excerpts from unpublished texts, and is still a valuable reference even today. He also compiled a similarly valuable catalogue of the Cambridge University Library collection. The manuscripts in this collection came mainly from Anglican Missionaries based at Urmiah.
His Short history of Syriac literature was written originally as an encyclopedia article, and so has no proper sub-divisions. It was republished after his death in book form, and has remained a basic handbook for the student of Syriac. The material in it comes from various sources, but much of it from the Chronicum Ecclesiasticum of Bar Hebraeus, of which no English translation exists.
A bibliography of his work can be found by R. L. Benaly, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1889, pp. 708 and following. There is also an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.[3]