Joseph de Guignes

Joseph de Guignes (October 19, 1721–March 1800), French orientalist and sinologist, was born at Pontoise, the son of Jean Louis de Guignes and Françoise Vaillant. He died in Paris.

He succeeded Fourmont at the Royal Library as secretary interpreter of the Eastern languages. A "Mémoire historique sur l'origine des Huns et des Turcs", published by de Guignes in 1748, obtained his admission to the Royal Society of London in 1752, and he became an associate of the French Academy of Inscriptions in 1754.

Two years later he began to publish his learned and laborious "Histoire générale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs et des autres Tartares occidentaux" (1756-1758); and in 1757 he was appointed to the chair of Syriac at the Collège de France. He maintained that the Chinese nation had originated in Egyptian colonization, an opinion to which, in spite of every argument, he obstinately clung. He published a number of articles arguing that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters were related, one deriving from the other. Although he was mistaken in this, his is the first scholar known to have recognize the fact that cartouche rings in Egyptian texts contained royal names.

The "Histoire" had been translated into German by Dahnert (1768-1771).

Joseph de Guignes' son, Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes (1759-1845) learned Chinese from his father; and then the son went as consul to Canton (Guangzhou), where he spent seventeen years. He returned to France in 1801. In 1808, he was charged by the government with the work of preparing a Chinese-French-Latin dictionary ("Dictionnaire Chinois, Français et Latin, le Vocabulaire Chinois Latin," 1813). He was also the author of a work of travels ("Voyages a Pékin, Manille, et l'île de France", 1808).

See Joseph Marie Quérard, "La France littéraire", where a list of the memoirs contributed by de Guignes to the "Journal des esçrivans" is given.----