Benoît de Maillet

Benoît de Maillet (Saint-Mihiel, 12 April 1656 – Marseille, 30 January 1738) was a well-travelled French diplomat and natural historian. He was French consul general at Cairo, and overseer in the Levant. He formulated an evolutionary hypothesis to explain the origin of the earth and its contents.

De Maillet's geological observations convinced him that the earth could not have been created in an instant because the features of the crust indicate a slow development by natural processes. He also believed that creatures on the land were ultimately derived from creatures living in the seas. He believed in the natural origin of man. He estimated that the development of the earth took two billion years.

De Maillet was a nobleman of Lorraine, born into a distinguished Catholic family. He did not attend university, but he received an excellent classical education. De Maillet was interested in geology and natural history, and took advantage of his travels to make observations. He was French general consul at Cairo (1692–1708), during which time he studied the Egyptian pyramids, and at Leghorn (1712–1717). He was French overseer in the Levant and the Barbary states from 1715 until his retirement.

His main work, Telliamed (his name in reverse), was based on manuscripts written between 1722 and 1732 and was published after his death in 1748. The printed text was the result of ten years' editing by the Abbott Jean Baptiste de Mascrier in an attempt to reconcile the proposed system with the dogma of the Catholic Church. De Maillet relied on him even though he had done a poor job editing de Maillet's earlier book Description de l'Egypte (1735). As a result of Mascrier's tinkering, none of the printed editions accurately represents de Maillet's work, though the best is the third and final edition, published in the Hague and Paris in 1755, which includes the only known biography of de Maillet.

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