The Table Mountain. Drawing by Solomon Malan (1839), now in Sasol Art Museum Stellenbosch
Solomon Caesar Malan (Geneva, April 22, 1812 - Bournemouth, November 25, 1894) was a Swiss-British hugenoots spiritual and polyglot.
Malan had a great talent for languages. At his eighteenth, he traveled to Scotland as home teacher of Tweeddale's Markies, and at that time he already had a reasonable knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew. As he did not yet manage English well during the exams in 1833 at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he asked the examiners whether he should hand in the papers in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin or Greek, rather than in the English. However, his request was rejected.
He received the scholarships of Pusey and Ellerton and passed the second degree in the Literary Humanities in 1837. He then left for India and became a teacher of classical languages in Calcutta. During this stay he laid his foundation for Tibetan and Chinese. In 1839 Malan stayed four months in South Africa, where he made hundreds of water stories. In 1840 he returned to the United Kingdom.
He served in various places as an assistant editor until he took place in 1845 in Broadwindsor, Dorset, where he remained until 1886. During this entire period, he increased his linguistic knowledge. He shared numerous translations from the Georgian, Armenian and Coptic and during his visit to Ninive in 1872 he preached in Georgian. His study of Chinese he combined by determining certain points of Chinese as compared to Christian religion and he published a large number of parallel passages with the book Proverbs. The University of Edinburgh awarded him the honors degree Doctor of Divinity in 1880.
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