John Staples Harriott
British Army officer (1780-1839)
John Staples Harriott (1780–1839) was a British army officer stationed in India, in the service of the East India Company. He came to acquire the Jami' al-tawarikh in its original manuscript. In his studies of the Roma people, he made an identification with a legend of Bahram Gur and the Luri to support a Romani presence in Sasanid Persia, now considered to be an unjustified and uncritical deduction that has persisted.
Life
He was a son of John Harriott. In 1796 he became a cadet with the East India Company, and became a lieutenant in the Bengal Presidency in 1798, captain in 1806, and major in 1817; lieutenant-colonel in 1823 and colonel in 1829. In 1803 he lost a leg at the Battle of Delhi, serving under Lord Lake. He lived much of his life in Calcutta, and ultimately reached the rank of Major General.
In 1819–20 Harriott was collecting Romani vocabulary in Hampshire, England. Some of his results were read to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1822. In 1830 a membership list for the Royal Asiatic Society gives his address as Mortlake.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16841302. VIAF identifies the subject as 315627218. The Library of Congress control number is no2020120983. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1780, 1839, 1796 and 1798.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Staples Harriott” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.