Henry Tattam (28 December 1789 – 8 January 1868,

Stanford Rivers Stanford Rivers is a village and civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counti ...

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...

) was a

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...

clergyman and

Coptic Coptic may refer to: Afro-Asia * Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya * Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century * Coptic alphabet ...

scholar.

Life

Tattam was

Rector Rector (Latin for the member of a vessel's crew who steers) may refer to: Style or title *Rector (ecclesiastical), a cleric who functions as an administrative leader in some Christian denominations *Rector (academia), a senior official in an edu ...

of St Cuthbert's

Bedford Bedford is a market town in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 Census, the population of the Bedford built-up area (including Biddenham and Kempston) was 106,940, making it the second-largest settlement in Bedfordshire, behind Luton, whilst ...

, 1822–1849, and from 1831 to 1849 also Rector of

Great Woolstone Great Woolstone and Little Woolstone are two historic villages in modern Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire that are now called jointly Woolstone or The Woolstones and form the heart of a new district of that name, in the Campbell Park (civil parish) ...

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire (), abbreviated Bucks, is a ceremonial county in South East England that borders Greater London to the south-east, Berkshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the west, Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north-ea ...

. He was Archdeacon of Bedford from 1845 to 1866, Rector of Stanford Rivers, Essex from 1849, and a Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the Queen from 1853.

Works

Tattam was the author of various theological and philological works, including several editions and translations of Coptic texts. He was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

in 1835. Tattam visited

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

and the

Holy Land The Holy Land; Arabic: or is an area roughly located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Eastern Bank of the Jordan River, traditionally synonymous both with the biblical Land of Israel and with the region of Palestine. The term "Holy ...

in 1838–9, meeting the patriarch and acquiring

and Syriac manuscripts for the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

(manuscripts now in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

). He received honorary degrees from Trinity College Dublin, the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...

and the University of Leiden. Tattam in 1848 published ''The Apostolical Constitutions, or Canons of the Apostles'', which includes the so-called ''Alexandrine Sinodos'' (or ''Clementine Heptateuch'') made of the

Apostolic Church-Ordinance The ''Apostolic Church-Ordinance'' (or ''Apostolic Church-Order'', ''Apostolic Church-Directory'' or ''Constitutio Ecclesiastica Apostolorum'') is an Oriental Orthodox Christian treatise which belongs to ''genre'' of the Church Orders. The work ...

, the

Egyptian Church Order The ''Apostolic Tradition'' (or ''Egyptian Church Order'') is an early Christian treatise which belongs to the genre of the ancient Church Orders. It has been described to be of "incomparable importance as a source of information about church lif ...

and a free version of the eighth book of the

Apostolic Constitutions The ''Apostolic Constitutions'' or ''Constitutions of the Holy Apostles'' (Latin: ''Constitutiones Apostolorum'') is a Christian collection divided into eight books which is classified among the Church Orders, a genre of early Christian litera ...

Works

* ''Helps to Devotion'', 1825 * ''Compendious Grammar of the Egyptian Language'', 1830 * ''A Defence of the Church of England Against the Attacks of a Roman Catholic Priest'', 1843 * ''A Compendious Grammar of the Egyptian Language'', 1863 (which was finally translated into Arabic by "Mina Saad Ibrahim" in 2010 under the title الشامل في قواعد اللغة القبطية )

References

External links

* *https://www.facebook.com/mina.saadebrahim/?ref=bookmarks {{DEFAULTSORT:Tattam, Henry 1789 births 1868 deaths Fellows of the Royal Society 19th-century English Anglican priests Archdeacons of Bedford English orientalists English philologists