Joseph de Guignes (October 19, 1721–March 1800), French orientalist and sinologist, was born at Pontoise, the son of Jean Louis de Guignes and Françoise Vaillant. He died in Paris.

He succeeded Fourmont at the Royal Library as secretary interpreter of the Eastern languages. A Mémoire historique sur l'origine des Huns et des Turcs, published by de Guignes in 1748, obtained his admission to the Royal Society of London in 1752, and he became an associate of the French Academy of Inscriptions in 1754.

Two years later he began to publish his learned and laborious Histoire générale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs et des autres Tartares occidentaux (1756-1758); and in 1757 he was appointed to the chair of Syriac at the Collège de France. He maintained that the Chinese nation had originated in Egyptian colonization, an opinion to which, in spite of every argument, he obstinately clung.

The Histoire had been translated into German by Dahnert (1768-1771).

One key idea which de Guines originated is the theory that the Huns who attacked the Roman Empire were the same people as the Xiongnu mentioned in Chinese records.^{[1] [2]} Most historians agree with this view, which was popularised by Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire

Contents 1 Historic errors 2 Father of Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes 3 Works 4 Notes 5 References

Historic errors

Joseph de Guignes was famously wrong in some of the conclusions he drew from historical research. For example, in 1758, he believed that he had proved that the Chinese were a colony of the ancient Egyptians.^[3]

He published a number of articles arguing that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters were related, one deriving from the other. Although he was mistaken in this, his is the first scholar known to have recognize the fact that cartouche rings in Egyptian texts contained royal names.

Father of Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes

Joseph de Guignes' son, Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes (1759-1845) learned Chinese from his father; and then the son went as consul to Canton (Guangzhou), where he spent seventeen years. In 1808, he was charged by the government with the work of preparing a Chinese-French-Latin dictionary (Dictionnaire Chinois, Français et Latin, le Vocabulaire Chinois Latin, 1813). He was also the author of a work of travels (Voyages a Pékin, Manille, et l'île de France, 1808).^[4]

See Joseph Marie Quérard, La France littéraire, where a list of the memoirs contributed by de Guignes to the Journal des esçrivans is given.

Works

• 1748 -- Memoire historique sur l'origine.
• 1757 -- Histoire generale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs el des autres Tartares occidentaux, 3 vols. Paris: Desaint & Saillant. OCLC 5153747
• 1761 -- Recherches sur les Navigations des Chinois du Cote de 1'Amerique, et sur quelques Peuples situes a 1'extremite orientale de l"asie.^[5]
• 1789 -- An historical essay on the origin of the Oriented characters in the Royal printing-house, on the works which have been printed at Paris, in Arabic in Syriac, in Armenian, &c. and on the Greek characters of Francis I. commonly called the King's Greek. London: OCLC 45767900

• 1824 -- Supplément a L'Histoire Générale Des Huns, Des Turks Et Des Mogols. with Osip Ivanovich Senkovskīĭ, Muhammad Yūsuf ibn Khawājah Baqā, Józef Se︣kowski, Muḥammad Yūsuf. Paris: Imprimerie de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences. OCLC 221450524

Notes

References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.