David Gordon Lyon
Quick Facts
Biography
David Gordon Lyon (24 May 1852 – 4 December 1935) was an American theologian.
Biography
Lyon was born in Benton, Alabama, the son of a doctor. He received his A.B. from Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1875. He studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary under Crawford Howell Toy, and went to Germany, where he married Tosca Woehler (d. 1904) and received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1882, in the study of Syriac.
He occupied the Hollis Chair at Harvard Divinity School from 1882 to 1910, when he assumed the Hancock professorship of Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Six years after Tosca Woehler's death (1904) he married Mabel E. Harris (d. 1931). He was the founding curator of the Semitic Museum. He retired from Harvard in 1921.
David Gordon Lyon kept a diary for over 30 years of his life. All of the diaries are now digitized and soon will be transcribed into a human and machine-readable form. A goldmine of information about his times, the history of Harvard University and the field of assyriology.