Theophilus Siegfried Bayer

Theophilus (Gottlieb) Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738) was a German classical scholar with specialization in Sinology. He was a Sinologist and professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at St Petersburg Academy of Sciences between 1726 and 1737.

Personal details

Bayer was a native of Königsberg, then in the Duchy of Prussia. His father Johann Friedrich was from the German Protestant minority in Hungary, but had moved to the Duchy of Prussia, where he worked as a painter. The youthful T. S. Bayer was an excellent student at the University of Königsberg, studying Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He was a Rector of the Königsberg Cathedral from 1721 to 1726, The library was later sold to a Lutheran pastor in London, Heinrich Walter Gerdes. William Hunter later purchased the collection from Gerdes' widow. It finally reached the University of Glasgow in 1807 with a brief stay in London with Dr Matthew Baillie, Hunter's nephew.

Works

Historia regni Graecorum bactriani [A History of the Kingdom of the Bactrian Greeks]. Manuscript in Latin and Chinese. De Eclipsi Sinica published in 1718. Works on the history of Russia, including De Varagis (1729) and Origines russicae (1736).