This was published at Leiden at the instigation of Gerard Vossius in 1630, and in the same year Pococke sailed for Aleppo, Syria as chaplain to the English factor.

[1] He entered the post on 10 August 1636; but the next summer he sailed back to Constantinople in the company of John Greaves, later Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, to prosecute further studies and collect more books; he remained there for about three years.

Through their offices he obtained, in 1648, the chair of Hebrew at the University of Oxford on the death of John Morris, though he lost the emoluments of the post soon after, and did not recover them until the Restoration.

[1] These events hampered Pococke in his studies, or so he complained in the preface to his Eutychius; he resented the attempts to remove him from his parish of Childrey, a college living near Wantage in North Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) which he had accepted in 1643.

In 1649, he published the Specimen historiae arabum, a short account of the origin and manners of the Arabs, taken from Bar-Hebraeus (Abulfaragius), with notes from a vast number of manuscript sources which are still valuable.

[1] After the Restoration, Pococke's political and financial troubles ended, but the reception of his magnum opus—a complete edition of the Arabic history of Bar-Hebraeus (Greg.

[2] One son, Edward (1648–1727),[2] published several contributions from Arabic literature: a fragment of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi's Account of Egypt and the Philosophus Autodidactus of Ibn Tufayl (Abubacer).

Both Edward Gibbon[6] and Thomas Carlyle exposed some "pious" lies in the missionary work by Grotius translated by Pococke, which were omitted from the Arabic text.