Quatremère

Quatremère, ÉTIENNE MARC, a French orientalist, was born in Paris, 12th July 1782, and from his earliest childhood to his latest years was immersed in study; he lived more after the fashion of a mediæval recluse than a modern scholar. Employed in 1807 in the manuscript department of the Imperial Library, he was promoted in 1809 to the Greek chair in the College of Rouen, and in 1819 to the chair of Ancient Oriental Languages in the Collège de France, and in 1827 he became professor of Persian in the School for Modern Oriental Languages. He died 18th September 1857. Although a man of vast and accurate knowledge, he had little critical insight or originality. His principal works are Recherches sur la Langue et la Littérature de l'Égypte (1808), proving that the language of ancient Egypt is to be sought for in modern Coptic; Mémoires Géographiques et Historiques sur l'Égypte (1810); Mémoire sur les Nabatéens (1835); Histoire des Sultans Mameloucks (1837), from the Arabic of Makrizi; Histoire des Mongols de la Perse (1836), from the Persian of Rashid ed-Din; an edition of the Arabic text of the Prolegomena of Ibn-Khaldun; and a multitude of articles scattered through the pages of the Journal Asiatique and the Journal des Savants. Besides this, he gathered materials for Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, Turkish, Persian, and Armenian dictionaries.