Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer

Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer (June 15, 1805 in Bautzen – April 5, 1841 in Leipzig) was a German orientalist, epigraphist and paleographer.

He was the decipherer of the Nabataean script, known at the time as the Sinaitic script. He died destitute at just 35 years old, possibly of starvation-related conditions.^[1]

^ Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1858). Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History. J. Murray. p. 58. Retrieved 2023-04-06. In 1840, Dr. Beer of Leipsic published a work containing one hundred of these inscriptions, in which he arrived at the conclusion, first, that the language was a dialect of Arabic, and that their contents were the greetings and names of travellers; secondly, that they were the work of Christian pilgrims. The author of this work died of starvation and neglect, just as it had acquired celebrity enough to procure him aid too late. It has since been followed up by Professor Tuch of Leipsic, (1849,) who agrees with Beer in the decypherment of the inscriptions

[Stanley_1858-1] Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1858). Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History. J. Murray. p. 58. Retrieved 2023-04-06. In 1840, Dr. Beer of Leipsic published a work containing one hundred of these inscriptions, in which he arrived at the conclusion, first, that the language was a dialect of Arabic, and that their contents were the greetings and names of travellers; secondly, that they were the work of Christian pilgrims. The author of this work died of starvation and neglect, just as it had acquired celebrity enough to procure him aid too late. It has since been followed up by Professor Tuch of Leipsic, (1849,) who agrees with Beer in the decypherment of the inscriptions

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