Edward Byles Cowell

Edward Byles Cowell, FBA (23 January 1826 – 9 February 1903) was a noted translator of Persian poetry and the first professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge University.

[3] He became interested in Oriental languages at the age of fifteen, when he found a copy of Sir William Jones's works (including his Persian Grammar) in the public library.

He married in 1845, and in 1850 entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied and catalogued Persian manuscripts for the Bodleian Library.

[4] In this year he discovered a manuscript of Omar Khayyám's quatrains in the Asiatic Society's library and sent a copy to London for his friend and student, Edward Fitzgerald, who then produced the famous English translations (the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859).

He also published, unsigned, an introduction to Khayyám with translations of thirty quatrains in the Calcutta Review (1858).