Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi

Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi (Theseus Ambrosius, 1469–1540) was an Italian humanist. During the Fifth Council of the Lateran, Teseo was tasked by Cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal to give religious instruction to a Syrian priest in Latin and liturgy and became an expert in the Syriac language himself.^[1] He was a proponent of Christian Kabbalah and an early student of Semitic languages. His Introductio ad Chaldaicam linguam, Syriacam, atque Armenicam, et decem alias linguas (Pavia 1539) was one of the earliest Western studies of Syriac and Armenian. The bulk of the work consists of an Introduction to Chaldean, Syriac and Armenian (foll. 9–192). To this is added an Appendix which includes the presentation of alphabets (foll. 193–213), including brief references to Coptic (called "Jacobite") and Ethiopic (misleadingly called "Indian") and comments on the ancestry of European languages, especially languages of Italy, with a discussion of Etruscan.