From the History of the Decipherment of West Semitic Writing: Events and People. (VII) Barthélemy the Orientalist: Between Scholarship and High Society. Part II (in Russian) (original) (raw)

In June 1744, Abbot Barthélemy arrived in Paris with many letters of recommendation. One of these letters was given to Claude de Boze, curator of the royal Cabinet des Médailles. Soon the young abbot was recruited as an assistant to de Boze and began active work in the field of numismatics. A few years later, with the help of patrons and friends, Barthélemy was elected as a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, where he made several presentations immediately recognized by the scholarly community. One of them was the first part of the Essai d’une Paléographie Numismatique, which proposed a new method for its time for attribution and systematization of the most archaic coins in the Mediterranean. However, Barthélemy did not pursue systematic work on the subject being for many years distracted, among other things, by writing his archaeological novel, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce. This work brought the author worldwide fame and recognition of the general public. At the end of his life, he nevertheless continued to work on his Paléographie and was very sorry that he would not have time to finish it. The scholar’s contemporaries and biographers noted that this delay cost Barthélemy the honorable place of the founder of modern numismatics.