A brilliant linguist, reputed to know forty languages, Edward Denison Ross also played a major role in shaping Oriental studies in the United Kingdom as the first Director of the School of Oriental Studies (subsequently renamed School of Oriental and African Studies) in London. His prodigious output of scholarly publications ranged from the history of Central Asia to editions of Arabic, Persian and Turkish texts, and even bird names in Manchu. Yet Ross's career was in a sense built on his early academic failure, his undistinguished performance at school capped by his rejection by a crammer as too hopeless a case to be worth even trying to coach for the Cambridge entrance examination.

He was born in London on 6 June 1871, the son of Rev. Alexander Ross, a Church of Scotland minster who had embraced Anglicanism. Alexander Ross was also a scholar of German and Hebrew and a regular writer for the Spectator, but he died when his son was a teenager. Hampered by childhood illness and a total inability at mathematics – he records having regarded algebra at school as a ‘hoax’ – Ross showed no sign of emulating his father's intellectual abilities during his time at Marlborough, where, by his own account, he seems to have learned very little. At the insistence of his widowed mother, he attended lectures in English literature, French and Italian at University College, London, without matriculating. He was the only student of the Professor of Italian, Farinelli, who had previously been a Lecturer in Sanskrit in Italy and who seems to have imbued Ross with an enthusiasm for Oriental languages. In 1889, Ross was sent to Paris to improve his French, which he decided to do by attending the lectures on Hebrew at the Sorbonne by the Biblical scholar Ernest Renan. Ross's studies soon encompassed Arabic, Turkish, Syriac and Armenian, but Persian swiftly came to be his favoured subject, in which he completed a doctorate at Strasburg under the famous Orientalist Nöldeke in 1896. His thesis was on a popular history of the first Safavid ruler Shah Ismail (r. 1501–24), which he believed dated to the first half of the sixteenth century and which became known to scholarship subsequently as the Ross Anonymous, although A. H. Morton established nearly a century later that the work in fact had been composed in the 1680s by an author named Bijan.