Background
Lyon was born in Benton, Alabama, the son of a doctor.
Lyon was born in Benton, Alabama, the son of a doctor.
He studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary under Crawford Howell Toy, and went to Germany, where he married Tosca Woehler (d 1904) and received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Leipzig in 1882, in the study of Syriac.
He received his Bachelor of Arts from Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1875. He occupied the Hollis Chair at Harvard Divinity School from 1882 to 1910, when he assumed the Hancock professorship of Hebrew and other Oriental languages. He was the founding curator of the Semitic Museum.
He retired from Harvard in 1921.
David Gordon Lyon kept a diary for over 30 years of his life. All of the diaries are now digitized and soon will be transcribed into a human and machine-readable form.
A goldmine of information about his times, the history of Harvard University and the field of assyriology.