Joseph Dacre Carlyle (1758-1804)

The Arabic scholar Joseph Dacre Carlyle was born in Carlisle in 1758, the son of a physician, George Carlyle and Dorothy Appleby. He was educated at Kirkby Lonsdale primary school, Carlisle Grammar School and Cambridge University where he was appointed Professor of Arabic in 1795. He succeeded William Paley in 1793 as Chancellor of Carlisle and in 1799  was attached by the British government to the embassy of Lord Elgin in the Ottoman Empire, tasked to explore libraries. He travelled to Constantinople, through Asia Minor, Palestine, Greece, and Italy, returning to England in September 1801 where he took up the post of Vicar of New­cas­tle up­on Tyne. He began an Arabic translation of the Bible that year but died three years later. He is the translator, into Latin, of Ibn Taghribirdi’s Rerum Ægyptiacarum Annales (Cambridge University Press, 1792) as well as the author of Specimens of Arabian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1796); Poems Suggested Chiefly by Scenes in Asia Minor, Syria and Greece (William Bulmer and Co., 1805). Carlyle’s translation of the Bible in Arabic was published by Sarah Hodgson in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1811.