Marie-Félicité Brosset

Marie-Félicité Brosset (January 24, 1802 – September 22, 1880) was a French orientalist who specialized in Georgian and Armenian studies.

He was born in Paris into the family of a poor merchant who died the same year that Brosset was born. His mother hoped to make a clergyman of him, and hence Brosset attended the theological seminaries in Orléans, where he studied the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic languages. Back in Paris, he attended the lectures delivered by leading French orientalists and began to study Chinese. He was elected to the Asiatic Society in 1825 and soon got interested in medieval Georgian and Armenian literature, hitherto little known to European scholarship. Invited by Count Sergey Uvarov, the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, to Saint Petersburg in 1837, he was elected a member of the Academy a year later. Back to Saint Petersburg from his 1847-8 Caucasus journey, Brosset translated and commented on all major medieval and early modern Georgian chroniclers and published them in French in seven volumes from 1849 to 1858. Overall, he authored over 200 works pertaining to Georgian and Armenian history and culture. For a while, his magnum opus, Histoire de la Géorgie, remained a standard authority on the history of Georgia available in Europe.

[edit] Works

His major works include:

• Histoire de la Géorgie depuis l’antiquité jusqu’au XIX^e siècle, v. 1-7. St.-РЬ., 1848-58. (Read this book at Google Books: [1], [2])
• Les ruines d’Ani, capitale de l'Arménie sous les rois Bagratides aux X^e et XI^e siècles, v. 1-2, St.-РЬ., 1860-61.
• Rapports sur un voyage archéologique dans la Géorgie et dans l'Arménie, exécuté en 1847-1848, livr. 1-3, St.-РЬ., 1849–51.

[edit] References

• (Russian) БРОССЕ Марий Иванович – His detailed biography at the Russian National Library website.
• (English) Georgian Literature in European Scholarship by Prof. Elguja Khintibidze.
• (French) Gaston Bouatchidzé, La vie de Marie Brosset, Editions du Petit Véhicule, Nantes, 1996.

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