Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/225

196 cholera in 1832, at the early age of forty-one. He rose from a comparatively humble sphere of life, and the aristocratic; prefix to his name seems to have been merely assumed. He was for a time a traveller to his father, who was a tailor, but his talent for languages soon transferred him from the mercantile to the learned world, and, combined with his strong Monarchical opinions, enabled him to secure a fair amount of success. He was especially devoted to Oriental studies, and he learned Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Armenian; but his attainments seem to have struck his contemporaries as more pretentious than profound. He was appointed, when only nineteen, to be secretary to the Society of Antiquaries (1810), and at thirty-one he became Curator of the Library of the Arsenal (1824) and afterwards an Inspector of the Eoyal Printing House, a position that enabled him to introduce the Zend and cuneiform type. He was a very precocious scholar, for one of the writings on which his fame rests was published at the age of twenty — 'Egypt under the Pharaohs' (1811). Seven years later his most important work appeared: ' An Historical and Geographical Memoir on Armenia ' (1818). He is remembered also as one of the founders of 'L'Universel (1829), a strong organ of the Legitimist party.

His paper on the cuneiform inscriptions was read before the Academic des Inscriptions, of which he was a member, in 1822, and it was afterwards published in the 'Journal Asiatique ' (February 1823). A more detailed account of his discoveries was promised, but it never seems to have appeared; and the only other authoritative expression of his opinion occurs in Klaproth's ' Aperçn de l'Origine des diverses Ecritures' (1832), where we are favoured with the latest development of his cuneiform alpliabet. His treatment of this