This book presents expanded versions of the papers delivered at a symposium held during the 175th anniversary celebration of Yale's 1841 appointment of Edward Elbridge Salisbury as America's first professor of Arabic and Sanskrit. Often drawing on original archival research, the articles place Salisbury in the context of 19th-century Orientalism, with particular attention to the interconnected growth of Assyriology in northern Europe and the U.S. Hitherto unheralded, Salisbury emerges as a founding figure in the development of ancient Near Eastern, Arabic, and Sanskrit studies, as well as in the rise of the American liberal arts university.
