Marie-Félicité Brosset

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

He was born in Paris into a family of a poor merchant who died in the same year when Brosset was born. His mother hoped to make a clergyman of him and hence Brosset attended the theological seminaries in Orleans, where he studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic languages. Back in Paris, he attended the lectures delivered by leading French orientalists and began to study Chinese language. He was elected to Societé Asiatique 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 St Petersburg in 1837, he was elected a member of the Academy a year later. Back to St 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 tomes 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.

His major works include:

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