TE SEO, AMBROGIO. - Orientalist, born in Albonese in the Lomellina in 1469, died in Pavia in 1540. Having attended the law school in Pavia, he entered the Congregation of the Canons Regular of the Lateran. Soon he revealed himself as a passionate researcher of Oriental texts.
During the Fifth Lateran Council, T. was in contact with the envoys of Patriarch Simon of the Mountain of Lebanon. He already knew something of Hebrew and Syriac and was entrusted with verifying the orthodoxy of their liturgical texts. Among the various scholars with whom he had dealings, it suffices to recall Widmanstetter, with whom he met in 1529 in Reggio Emilia. To him T. handed over a Syriac manuscript of the Gospels, which was widely used by Widmanstetter for the edition of the Novum Testamentum Syriacum (Vienna 1655). In 1539 T. published in Pavia an Introduzione alla lingua caldea, siriaca, armena e ad altre dieci lingue. Differenti caratteri di circa quaranta alfabeti e la loro reciproca corrispondenza. Numerose notizie mistiche e cabalistiche degne di essere conosciute. E la descrizione e l’immagine del Phagot Afranii. The long title gives an idea of the heterogeneous character of the work, in which autobiographical and historical notes are interwoven with good linguistic observations or with cabalistic digressions. It was a pioneering grammatical attempt, at least for Syriac and Armenian.