GUIGNES, Joseph de (1721-1800), a French Orientalist, born at Pontoise October 19, 1721, became in his fifteenth year a student of Oriental languages, and especially of Chinese, at the Collége Royal under the celebrated Fourmont, whom in 1745 he succeeded at the Royal Library as secretary interpreter of the Eastern languages. A Mémoire Historique sur VOrigine des Huns et des Titres, published by De Guignes in 1748, having brought his name with some prominence before the learned world, he was admitted a member of the Royal Society of London in 1752 and an associate of the French Academy of Inscriptions in 1754. Two years later he gave to the world the first two volumes of his learned and laborious Histoire Générale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs, et des autres Tartaros occidentaux-, and in 1757 he was appointed to succeed Jault in the chair of Syriac at the Collège Royal. The completion of the Histoire by the publication of the three remaining volumes in 1758 was followed in 1759 by the publication of a Mémoire in which he propounded and endeavoured to prove the untenable and absurd theory that the Chinese natiou had originated in Egyptian colonization, an opinion to which, in spite of every argument, he to the last obstinately clung. To its support, as also to the further elucidation of the chronology and arrangement of his Histoire, which had been, not without some justice, unfavourably criticized, he devoted several learned papers which are to be found in the Mémoires of the Academy of Inscriptions; and among his other literary labours, an improved edition of an old translation of the Shoo-king is worthy of special mention. The Revolution, while permitting De Guignes to retain some insignificant pensions which had been conferred upon him, deprived him of ...