- Edmund Castell
Edmund Castell (1606-1685) was an English
orientalist .He was born at
Tadlow , inCambridgeshire . At the age of fifteen he enteredEmmanuel College, Cambridge , but afterwards moved to St John's, because of the valuable library there. His great work, the "Lexicon Heptaglotton Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Samaritanum, Aethiopicum, Arabicum, et Persicum" (1669), took him eighteen years to complete, working (according to his own account) from sixteen to eighteen hours a day. He employed fourteen assistants on the project, and spent £12,000, ruining himself in the process as there was little demand for his finishedlexicon .By 1667, he found himself in prison because he was unable to discharge his brother's debts, for which he had made himself liable. However, a volume of poems dedicated to the king brought him preferment. He was made
prebendary ofCanterbury Cathedral and professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Before undertaking the "Lexicon Heptaglotton", Castell had helped Dr Brian Walton in the preparation of his "Polyglott Bible". He died atHigham Gobion ,Bedfordshire , where he wasrector , and bequeathed his manuscripts to theUniversity of Cambridge .The
Syriac section of the "Lexicon" was issued separately atGöttingen in 1788 by J.D. Michaelis, who made a tribute to Castell's learning and industry. Trier published the Hebrew section in 1790-1792.References
*1911
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