Étienne Fourmont (23 June 1683 – 8 December 1745) was a French orientalist.
Born at Herblay near Argenteuil, he studied at the Collège Mazarin in Paris and afterwards in the Collège Montaigu where his attention was attracted to Oriental languages.
Shortly after leaving the college he published a Traduction du commentaire du Rabbin Abraham A ben Esra sur l'Ecclésiaste.
In 1711 Louis XIV appointed Fourmont to assist a young Chinese Hoan-ji, in compiling a Chinese grammar. Hoan-ji died in 1716 and it was not until 1737 that Fourmont published Meditationes Sinicae and in 1742 Grammatica Sinica. He also wrote Réflexions critiques sur les histoires des anciens peuples (1735), and several dissertations printed in the Memoires of the Academy of Inscriptions.
He became professor of Arabic in the Collège de France in 1715. In 1713 he was elected a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, in 1738 a member of the Royal Society of London, and in 1742 a member of that of Berlin. He died at Paris on 8 December 1745.
His brother, Michel Fourmont (1690–1746), was also a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, and professor of the Syriac language in the Royal College, and was sent by the government to copy inscriptions in Greece. Michel Fourmont is remembered for the destruction of ancient Sparta.
Fourmont records in 1730:
For a month now, despite illness, I have been engaged with thirty workmen in the entire destruction of Sparta; not a day passes but I find something, and on some I have found up to twenty inscriptions. You understand, Monsieur, with what great joy, and with what fatigue, I have recovered such a great quantity of marbles. . ..
If by overturning its walls and temples, if by not leaving one stone on another in the smallest of its sacella, its place will be unknown in the future, 1 at least have something by which to recognise it, and that is something. I have only this means to render my voyage in the Morea illustrious, which otherwise would have been entirely useless, which would have suited neither France, nor me.
I am becoming a barbarian in the midst of Greece; this place is not the abode of the Muses, ignorance has driven them out, and it is that which makes me regret France, whither they have retreated. I should have liked to have more time to bring them at least more than bare nourishment, but the orders 1 have just received oblige me to finish.
Edward Dodwell on his later visit to Sparta in 1801 reported that Fourmont was still remembered as ordering the defacement of inscriptions he had just recorded."