Fulgence Fresnel

Who was Fulgence Fresnel?

Fulgence Fresnel was a French Orientalist who was a native of Mathieu, Calvados. He was brother to physicist Augustin Fresnel.

As a young man, he studied sciences, literature and languages, and translated a few works of Berzelius, stories by German novelist Johann Ludwig Tieck and fragments of a Chinese novel. He was a pupil of Sylvestre de Sacy in Paris, and in 1826 undertook studies of Arabic at Maronite College in Rome.

Later, he served as a consular agent in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah. In Arabia, he became a proficient speaker of local dialects, during which time, he came in contact with descendants of the Himyarites. Fresnel is credited as the first European to provide a translation of ancient Himyarite inscriptions.

In 1851 he was put in charge of a scientific expedition to Mesopotamia, where he was accompanied by Assyriologist Jules Oppert. When the expedition members were recalled in 1854, Fresnel chose to remain in the Middle East, and died in Baghdad on November 30, 1855. His notes on the journey were included in Oppert's work, Expedition en Mesopotamie.