Joseph Elian Sarkis

Joseph Elian Sarkis was a writer and translator from Damascus. He was born in 1856 and pursued his literary activity alongside a banking profession. He worked for nearly 35 years as an employee at the Ottoman Imperial Bank in the branches of Beirut, Damascus, Cyprus, Ankara, and Constantinople. He settled in Cairo in 1912, where he became a bookseller-publisher. He published several works in Arabic, including translations of Jules Verne and Louis Friedel, and his own Encyclopedic Dictionary of Arabic Bibliography, which he dedicated to Ahmed Teymour Pasha, a great scholar and friend. He was also interested in archaeology and numismatics, and was a member of honor of the Russian Archaeological Society of Istanbul. He received the title of knight of Saint Gregory in 1926 for his services to the Vatican Library. He died in 1932 of natural causes.