Fulgence Fresnel


Fulgence Fresnel was a French Orientalist. He was brother to physicist Augustin Fresnel and is noted as an Orientalist scholar who led one of the first archaeological teams to excavate in Mesopotamia.

Education and career

As a young man, he studied sciences, literature and languages, and translated a few works of Berzelius, stories by German novelist Johann Ludwig Tieck and fragments of a Chinese novel. He was a pupil of Sylvestre de Sacy in Paris, and in 1826 undertook studies of Arabic at Maronite College in Rome.
Later, he served as a consular agent in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah. In Arabia, he became a proficient speaker of local dialects, and during this time period, he came in contact with descendants of the Himyarites. Fresnel is credited as the first European to provide a translation of ancient Himyarite inscriptions. He also wrote the first description of the Shehri language.
In 1851 he was put in charge of a scientific expedition to Mesopotamia, where he was accompanied by assyriologist Jules Oppert and architect, Felix Thomas. A notable feature of the expedition was the use of a new and still secret procedure for making casts, developed by Lattin de Laval. Fresnel's notes on the expedition were included in the treatise, Expedition Scientifique En Mésopotamie: Exécutée Par Ordre Du Gouvernement De 1851 À 1854 by Julius Oppert first published in 1858.
When the expedition members were recalled in 1854, Fresnel chose to remain in the Middle East, and died in Baghdad on 30 November 1855.

Selected publications