HYDE, Thomas, one of the most learned of English orientalists, was born in 1636, at Billingsley, near Bridgenorth in Yorkshire. He inherited his taste for linguistic studies from his father, who was rector of that parish. At the age of sixteen he entered King's College, Cambridge, and under Wheelock, the famous professor of Arabic, made great and rapid progress in the Eastern tongues. After spending a year at that university, Hyde removed to London, where he was engaged to aid Walton in his edition of the Polyglot Bible. Besides correcting the Arabic, Syriac, and Persian texts, he transcribed in Persian characters the Persian translation of the Pentateuch that had been printed in Hebrew shortly before at Constantinople, and appended a Latin version of his own. The success with which he accomplished these difficult tasks met the acknowledgments of the most
learned men of the age. In 1658 Hyde entered Queen's College, Oxford, to which he was shortly after made Hebrew reader. In the following year, after graduating as M.A., he was chosen under-keeper, and finally librarian-in-chief of the Bodleian library. In 1660 he was made a canon of Salisbury; in 1678 archdeacon of Gloucester; and four years later took his degree of D.D. The death of Pococke in 1691 opened up to him the Laudian professorship of Arabic; and soon after, on the deprivation of Altham, he became regius professor of Hebrew, and canon of Christ Church. Worn out by his unremitting labours, he resigned his librarianship in 1701, and died two years later, February 18, 1703.
The range of Hyde's erudition in Oriental matters was vast. There was hardly an Eastern tongue to be learned with which he was not familiar. He even knew Chinese—a language which very few Europeans of that day could boast of knowing. He learned it from Chin-fo-coung, a learned young Chinese brought to this country by the Jesuits. His mastery of the more accessible languages of the East—such as Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Armenian, &c.—is proved by his numerous and still valuable works. The best of these is his Veterum Persarum et Magorum religionis Historia, in which, for the first time, an attempt is made to correct from Oriental authorities the errors of the Greek and Latin historians who have described the religion of the ancient Persians. Of his other works may be mentioned his Tabula Long. ac Latit. Stellarum Fixarum ex observatione Ulugh Beighi, &c., to which Hyde has appended a learned commentary exhibiting the different names of the stars among the Orientals and the Greeks, and endeavouring to trace them to a common origin; Quatuor Evangelia et Acta Apostolorum Lingua Malaica characteribus Europæis, Oxford, 1677; Epistola de Mensuris et Ponderibus Serum sive Sinensium, appended to Bernard's treatise De Mensuris et Ponderibus; De Ludis Orientalibus, libri ii., Oxford, 1694. The whole of Hyde's works, except that on the Religion of the Ancient Persians, were reprinted by Granville Sharp, under the title of Syntagma Dissertationum quas olim D. Thomas Hyde, separatim edidit, Oxford, 1767. In this edition, Sharp incorporated a number of other works of Hyde's which had been left in MS. The Hist. Relig. Vet. Pers. was not included in Sharp's edition, as it had been republished shortly before by Hunt and Costard.