thumb|Portrait of Étienne Marc Quatremère (1821)
Étienne Marc Quatremère (12 July 1782, Paris18 September 1857, Paris) was a French Orientalist.
Biography
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 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.
Quatremère edited and translated part of Al-Maqrizi's, (1364–1442), Arabic History of the Memaluke 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 fifteenth-century Arabic and particularly in those lexicographic nuggets that had not been defined in the standard of Arabic dictionaries".
A biographical notice by Barthélemy Sainte-Hilaire is prefixed to Quatremère's Mélanges d'histoire et de philologie orientale (1861). Quatremère's grave is in the 32nd division of the Père Lachaise Cemetery of Paris.
Sources
- Lesley & Roy Adkins (2000). The Keys of Egypt. London: HarperCollins.
- Robert Graham Irwin (2006). For Lust of Knowing. London: Allen Lane.