Étienne Marc Quatremère

Born into a Jansenist family, Étienne and his mother, who knew Latin, had to go into hiding in the countryside when his father, a clothing merchant made a member of the French nobility by king Louis XV of France with the mention by the king to continue in his trading and shop keeping however, was executed in 1793 during the French Revolution.

[1] Later he studied Arabic under Silvestre de Sacy, (1758–1838), a member of the French nobility since 1813 and the son of a public notary with Jewish roots, becoming later a rector at the University of Paris, in the School of Living Oriental Languages.

[1] Employed in 1807 in the manuscript department of the imperial library, he passed to the chair of Greek in the 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 1838 became professor of Persian in the School of Living Oriental Languages,[2] on the death of Silvestre de Sacy.

This publication forced Jean-François Champollion, the famous decoder of the Rosetta Stone, to publish, prematurely, an "Introduction" to his L'Égypte sous les pharaons.

[1] He published among other works Mémoires sur les Nabatéens (1835); a translation of Rashid-al-Din Hamadani's, (1247–1318), Histoire des Mongols de la Perse (1836); Mémoire géographique et historique sur l'Egypte (1810); the text of Ibn Khaldun's (1332–1406) Prolegomena; and a vast number of useful memoirs in the Journal asiatique.