Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the granddaughter of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne through her father Henri Pirenne, Jacqueline Pirenne attended the Lycée Molière in Paris and completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1939. Following World War II, she undertook further study in philology and oriental history at the Catholic University of Leuven, where she completed her doctoral thesis in 1954. Her research focussed on South Arabia, especially ancient Sheba and Qataban, and the Semitic languages of the Arabian peninsula. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Gonzague Ryckmans and René Dussaud, employed comparisons between Greek and South Arabian art to propose a 'short chronology' of the ancient South Arabian kingdoms, which placed the origin of these kingdoms in the 5th century BC – substantially later than had previously been believed. She continued to argue for this chronology in subsequent work, making use of palaeographic evidence for changing letter-forms in inscriptions, such as those of Al-Masajid. This work culminated in the publication of Le royaume sud-arabe de Quataban in 1961. From 1957 to 1985, she worked at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, eventually rising to the position of Director of Research. From 1960 to 1971, Pirenne produced a number of studies of South Arabian sculpture and architectural elements. From 1974 until 1986, she directed the excavation of Shabwa, capital of ancient Hadhramaut. The first volume of excavation reports, containing the inscriptions found on the site, was published by Pirenne in 1990. With the assistance of André Dupont-Sommer, she produced the Corpus des Inscriptions et Antiquités sud-arabes, a major collection of South Arabian inscriptions, which was published in seven volumes between 1977 and 1986. After leaving the CNRS in 1985, Pirenne spent two years in Addis Abeba, working on the chronology of the kings of Aksum and helping to support Ethiopian orphans. Her work in this area was continued by one of her pupils, Gigar Tesfaye. She returned to France in 1987 to took up a chair of Sabaean studies at the University of Strasbourg. She was killed in a car accident in Strasbourg in 1990.
Selected works
1955/57. Paleographie des inscriptions sud-arabes. Presses de la Academie, Brüssel.
1958 À la découverte de l'Arabie. Cinq siècles de science et d'aventure. Paris.
1960. "italic=unset". In: Mémoires présentés par divers savants à l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 15 pp. 89–196.
1961. Le royaume sud-arabe de Quataban et sa datation d'apres l'archeologie et les sourches classiques jusqu'au Periple de la Mer erithree italic=unset
1990. Fouilles de Shabwa I, Les témoins écrits de la région de Shabwa et l'Histoire, BAH 134.
