Jacobus Golius

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Jacobus Golius, born Jacob van Gool in 1596 in The Hague, was a Dutch Orientalist and mathematician at Leiden University. He is best known for his work with Arabic texts and translations.

Golius studied mathematics at Leiden starting in 1612 and began studying Arabic and other Eastern languages there in 1618, becoming the most distinguished pupil of Erpenius. In 1622 he joined the Dutch embassy to Morocco, and after returning he was chosen to succeed Erpenius as professor of Arabic at Leiden in 1625. He then went on a long tour of the Eastern Mediterranean (1626–1629) to collect Arabic and Persian texts for the Leiden library.

He owned a Malay-Dutch dictionary, which was sold to Narcissus Marsh in 1696 and later bequeathed to the Bodleian Library after Marsh’s death.

Golius spent the rest of his life at Leiden, holding chairs in mathematics and Arabic. He taught mathematics to the French philosopher René Descartes and corresponded with him, likely sharing Arabic mathematical texts, including works on conics.

Among his publications were editions of various Arabic texts (for example, Proverbia quaedam Alis, imperatoris Muslemici, Carmen Tograipoetae doctissimi, and a dissertatio Aben Synae, 1629; Ahmedis Arabsiadae vitae et rerum gestarum Timuri, 1636). In 1656 he published a new edition with additions of Erpenius’s Grammatica Arabica. After his death, a Persian-Latin dictionary manuscript was found and published with additions by Edmund Castell in Lexicon heptaglotton (1669).

Golius edited, translated, and annotated the astronomical treatise of the 9th-century Arabic astronomer Al-Farghani. His Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, about 1500 pages, appeared in Leiden in 1653 and was a major improvement on the Arabic-to-Latin dictionary of Franciscus Raphelengius (1613). Golius could translate Arabic dictionaries that Raphelengius could not access. The Lexicon was later expanded by Georg Freytag in 1837.