Etienne Marc Quatremère

Étienne Marc Quatremère (12 July 1782, Paris – 18 September 1857, Paris) was a French Orientalist.

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. 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.

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, on the death of Silvestre de Sacy .

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, the famous decoder of the Rosetta stone, 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".

...
Wikipedia