The Arabic-English Lexicon

Abstract The first volume of Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon was published in spring 1863, twenty-two years after the project began. It displays all the photographic accuracy for which he is so well known, combined with scholarship of a kind — acquired as it was in the East — which is hard to attain. The nomination of “M. Edouard Guillaume Lane” described him as a distinguished orientalist who had made “little noise in the world” but had become well known to the learned; it confidently predicted that the Arabic-English Lexicon would become “a mine of research for the centuries.” Turning the pages of beautifully chromolithographed plates, Lane remembered the original drawings that Lepsius had shown him twenty years before in Cairo. As he occasionally confided, a secret part of him was still fascinated with ancient Egypt.