- Adriaan Reland
Adriaan Reland (also known as "Adriaen Reeland/Reelant", "Hadrianus Relandus") (
July 17 1676 ,De Rijp -February 5 1718 , Utrecht John Gorton, "A General Biographical Dictionary", 1838, Whittaker & Co. ] ) was a Dutchscholar ,cartographer andphilologist .Reland was the son of Johannes Reland, a Protestant minister, and Aagje Prins in the small
North Holland village of De Rijp. Adriaan's brother, Peter (1678-1714) was an influential lawyer inHaarlem . Reeland first studied inAmsterdam and enrolled atUniversity of Utrecht in 1693. After obtaining [http://dap.library.uu.nl/cgi-bin/dap/dap?diss_id=20158 his PhD] in Utrecht he moved toLeiden where he tutored the son of Hans Wilem Bentinck, later the 1st Earl of Portland. The latter invited him to move to England, but Reland declined because of his father's deteriorating health .Reland was one of the early
Orientalists . [Power And Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini Cultural Policies, P. J. A. N. Rietbergen, p.321] He was appointed professor of philosophy at theUniversity of Harderwijk in 1699. [ [http://bc.ub.leidenuniv.nl/bc/olg/portret/content.html Adriaan Reland (1676-1718)] ] . From 1701 onwards he was professor of Oriental languages at the University of Utrecht. In 1713, he also taught Hebrew antiquities. Reland was acclaimed for his painstaking studies of Islam and linguistic research. He traced the eastward extension of Malay-like languages into the western Pacific.Reland died in 1718 in Utrecht of small pox.
Published work
* "
Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata " - a detailed geographical survey ofPalestine in 1696 written inLatin and published byTrajecti Batavorum , Utrecht, in 1714.
* "De religione Mohammedica libri duo " - the firstEurope an work to attempt to describe theIslamic religion in a relatively objective way. Published in 1705."
*"Poemata quae hactenus reperiri potuerunt curante Abrahamo Perrenot" - An anthology of Latin poetry (published with the pseudonym Abraham Perrenot in 1701, under his own name in 1745)
*"De natuurlijke wijsgeer" - a Dutch translation ofIbn Tufail 's Arabic novel "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan " (printed by Willem Lamsveld in 1701)References
External links
* [http://www.nationaalarchief.nl/AMH/detail.aspx?page=dpers&lang=en&id=581 Maps by Reland]
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