Vambery

Vambery, Arminius (b. 1832), traveller and Orientalist, was born of Jewish parentage in Hungary. His parents were poor, and he was intended for a tailor, but was enabled to secure a sound education at Pressburg, Vienna, and Pesth, and became a teacher of languages. He was expelled from Pesth on account of his connection with the revolutionary movement of 1848. He went to the East, and made himself master of many of the Eastern tongues, traveling through the most inaccessible parts of Turkestan. He was made a professor of Oriental languages and literature in Pesth University in 1865, and has published records of his journeys and other valuable works, philological and historical, including a History of Bokhara (1873), and The Central Asian and Anglo-Russian Frontier Question (1874).