W. Wright (1830-1889) W. Wright was a famous British Orientalist and Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge. Many of his works on Syriac literature are still in print and of considerable scholarly value, especially the catalogues of the holdings of the British Library and Cambridge University Library. A Grammar of the Arabic Language, often simply known as Wright’s Grammar, continues to be a popular book with students of Arabic. Wright is also remembered for the Short History of Syriac Literature. Wright was educated at St Andrew’s University, Halle and Leiden. He was Professor of Arabic at University College London from 1855 to 1856, and Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin from 1856 to 1861. From 1861 to 1869, he was an Assistant in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum and from 1869 to 1870, Assistant Keeper at the museum. In 1870, he was appointed Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and he held the chair there until his death. He also translated and edited Caspari’s Grammar of the Arabic; collected and edited-Opuscula Arabica (Leyden, 1859). His main achievement was as a cataloguer of manuscript collections. The rich Syriac holdings of the British Museum (now in the British Library) were mainly obtained in the 1840s from the monastery of Deir al-Syriani in the Nitrian desert in Egypt and contained a large number of previously unknown texts. A bibliography of his work can be found by R. L. Benaly, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1889, pp. 708ff. There is also an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 63. pp. 138-139.