Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (; 21 September 175821 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Life and works

Early life

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family, composed largely of notaires. The surname extension of "de Sacy" was added by the younger son after the name of Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, a famous Jansenist cleric who lived in the 17th century. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated on his own by his mother.

Silvestre de Sacy was educated in a Benedictine abbey by private tutors. They taught him Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and Hebrew. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became the first and only professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes).

During this interval Sacy studied the religion of the Druze, the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). He published the following Arabic textbooks:

Egyptian hieroglyphics research

Silvestre de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta Stone. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription.

From 1807 to 1809, Sacy was also a teacher of Jean-François Champollion, whom he encouraged in his research.

But later on, the relationship between the master and student became chilly. In no small measure, Champollion's Napoleonic sympathies were problematic for Sacy, who was decidedly Royalist in his political sympathies.

Notable students

In Edward Said's Orientalism, Sacy is described as "the teacher of nearly every major Orientalist in Europe, where his students dominated the field for about three-quarters of a century."

  • Louis-Mathieu Langlès, Curator, Bibliothèque Nationale
  • Adam Franz Lennig, German Catholic theologian, and one of the most influential German priests of his day.
  • Samuel Gobat, Anglican-Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem

Silvestre de Sacy assisted the young composer Fromental Halévy in his early career, giving him a testimonial during his application for the Prix de Rome.

Sacy died in his native city of Paris, aged 79.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 1,000+ works in 1,000+ publications in 16 languages and 3,000+ library holdings.

  • Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse: et sur les médailles des rois de la dynastie des Sassanides; suivis de l'histoire de cette dynastie (1793)
  • Principes de grammaire générale : mis à la portée des enfans, et propres à servir d'introduction à l'étude de toutes les langues (1799)
  • Mémoire sur divers événements de l'histoire des Arabes avant Mahomet (1803)
  • Chrestomathie arabe, ou, Extraits de divers écrivains arabes, tant en prose qu'en vers, avec une traduction française et des notes, à l'usage des élèves de l'École royale et spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1806)
  • Specimen historiae arabum by Bar Hebraeus (1806)
  • Mémoire sur la dynastie des Assassins et sur l'origine de leur nom (1809)
  • Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1810)
  • Les séances de Hariri, publiées en arabe avec un commentaire choisi by Ḥarīrī (1822)
  • Anthologie grammaticale arabe: ou, Morceaux choisis de divers grammairiens et scholiastes arabes, avec une traduction française et des notes; pouvant faire suite a la Chrestomathie arabe (1829)
  • Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1831)
  • Exposé de la religion des druzes, tiré des livres religieux de cette secte, et précédé d'une introduction et de la Vie du khalife Hakem-biamr-Allah (1838)
  • Les mille et une nuits; contes arabes (1839)
  • Bibliothèque de M. le baron Silvestre de Sacy (1846)
  • Mélanges de littérature orientale (1861)

References

Sources