SILVESTRE DE SACY, ANTOINE ISAAC, BARON (1758-1838), French orientalist, was born in Paris on Sept. 21, 1758. In 1781 he entered the civil service, but he retired in 1792 and lived in seclusion till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages. The interval was in part devoted to the study of the religion of the Druses, which was the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Expose de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 2838). Since the death of Johann Jakob Reiske, Arabic learning had been in a backward state. In the Grammaire arabe ( 2 vols., 1st ed. 181o, 2nd ed. 1831) and the Chrestomathie arabe (3 vols., 1806), together with its supple ment, the Anthologie grammaticale (1829), De Sacy supplied admirable text-books. In 1806 he became Persian professor. In 1815 he became rector of the university of Paris, and after the second restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Remusat he was joint founder of the Societe asiatique, and was inspector of oriental types at the royal printing press. De Sacy, who had been created a peer of France
in 1832, died on Feb. 2 I, 1838.
Among his other works are his edition of Hariri (1822, 2nd edition by Reinaud, 1847, 1855), with a selected Arabic commentary, and of the Alfiya (1833), and his Gallia et Dimna (1816) ,—the Arabic ver sion of that famous collection of Buddhist animal tales which has been in various forms one of the most popular books of the world; a ver sion of Abd-Allatif, Relation arabe sur I'Egypte, and essays on the history of the law of property in Egypt since the Arab conquest (1805-18). To biblical criticism he contributed a memoir on the Samaritan Arabic of the Pentateuch (Mem. Acad. des lnscr. vol. xlix.), and editions of the Arabic and Syriac New Testaments for the British and Foreign Bible Society. Of the brilliant teachers who went out from his lecture-room may be mentioned Professor Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (18o1-88), who contributed elaborate notes and corrections to the Grammaire arabe (Kleinere Schriften, vol. i., 1885).