Caption

Thomas Hyde (1636-1703), English orientalist. Hyde was educated at Eton College and then Cambridge University. He studied a wide variety of languages, especially oriental ones. The languages he wrote on included Turkish, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Hebrew and Malay. His major work was Historia religionis veterum Persarum (1700), where he corrected the errors made by Greek and Roman historians concerning the Persians. Artwork from his collected works Syntagma dissertationum quas olim auctor doctissimus (Oxford, 1767).