Etienne Marc Quatremère

Étienne Marc Quatremère (July 12, 1782 - 1857) was a French Orientalist.

Born into a Jansenist family, Étienne and his mother had to go into hiding in the countryside when his father was executed during the French Revolution.Irwin, 148] Later he studied Arabic under Silvestre de Sacy in the School of Living Oriental Languages.

Employed in 1807 in the manuscript department of the imperial library, he passed to the chair of Greek in university of Rouen in 1809, entered the Academy of Inscriptions in 1815, taught Hebrew and Aramaic in the Collège de France from 1819, and finally in 1827 became professor of Persian in the School of Living Oriental Languages.

Quatremère's first work was "Recherches ... sur la langue et la littérature de l'Egypte" (1808), showing that the language of ancient Egypt must be sought in Coptic.

His "Mémoires géographiques et historiques sur l'Égypte… sur quelques contrées voisines" was published in 1811. This publication forced Jean-François Champollion to publish, prematurely, an "Introduction" to his "L'Égypte sous les pharaons". Since both works concern the Coptic names of Egyptian towns, and Champollion's was published later, Champollion was accused by some of plagiarism. In fact "neither he nor Quatremère had copied from one another, and very obvious differences of approach were apparent in their publications". [Adkins & Adkins, 97-8]

Quatremère edited and translated part of Al-Maqrizi's "Arabic History of the Mameluke Sultans" (2 vols., 1837-41), "not because he had all that much interest in the history of Mamluk Egypt, but rather because he was fascinated by the vocabulary of fifteen-century Arabic and particularly in those lexicographic nuggets that had not been defined in the standard of Arabic dictionaries".

He published among other works "Mémoires sur les Nabatéens" (1835); a translation of Rashid al-Din's "Histoire des Mongols de la Perse" (1836); "Mémoire géographique et historique sur l'Egypte" (1810); the text of Ibn Khaldun's "Prolegomena"; and a vast number of useful memoirs in the "Journal asiatique". His numerous reviews in the "Journal des savants" should also be mentioned.

Quatremère made great lexicographic collections in Oriental languages, fragments of which appear in the notes to his various works. His manuscript material for Syriac was utilized in Robert Payne Smith's "Thesaurus"; of the slips he collected for a projected Arabic, Persian and Turkish lexicon some account is given in the preface to Dozy, "Supplément aux dictionaires arabes". They are now in the Munich library.

A biographical notice by Barthélemy Sainte-Hilaire is prefixed to Quatremère's "Mélanges d'histoire et de philologie orientale" (1861).

References

* Lesley & Roy Adkins (2000). "The Keys of Egypt". London: HarperCollins.
* Robert Graham Irwin (2006). "For Lust of Knowing". London: Allen Lane.

Notes

:1911