Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (sasi; 21 September 1758 - 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist. Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family. The surname extension of "de Sacy" was added by the younger son after the name of Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, a famous Jansenist cleric who lived in the 17th century. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated on his own by his mother. In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department. Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became the first and only professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes). During this interval Sacy studied the religion of the Druze, the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). He published the following Arabic textbooks: Grammaire arabe (2 vols., 1st ed. 1810) Chrestomathie arabe (3 vols., 1806) Anthologie grammaticale (1829) In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days. He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was created a baron of the French Empire by Napoleon in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, he became a peer of France and regularly spoke in the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des Pairs).