Auguste Mariette
French archaeologist and egyptologist (1821–1881)
François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette (French pronunciation: [ɔɡyst(ə) maʁjɛt]; 11 February 1821 – 18 January 1881) was a French scholar, archaeologist and Egyptologist, and the founder of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Early career
Auguste Mariette was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, where his father was town clerk. Educated at the Boulogne municipal college, where he distinguished himself and showed much artistic talent, he went to England in 1839 when he was eighteen as professor of French and drawing at a boys' school at Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1840 he became pattern-designer to a ribbon manufacturer in Coventry, but he returned the same year to Boulogne, and in 1841 took a degree at the University of Douai. Mariette proved to be a talented draftsman and designer, and he supplemented his salary as a teacher at Douai by giving private lessons and writing on historical and archaeological subjects for local periodicals.
Meanwhile, his cousin Nestor L'Hôte, the friend and fellow-traveller of Champollion, died, and the task of sorting his papers filled Mariette with a passion for Egyptology. Largely self-taught, he devoted himself to the study of hieroglyphs and Coptic. His 1847 analytic catalogue of the Egyptian Gallery of the Boulogne Museum got him a minor appointment at the Louvre Museum in 1849.
He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869.
First trip to Egypt
Mariette first went to Egypt in 1850.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q311850. VIAF identifies the subject as 2521520. The Library of Congress control number is n85118000. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1821, 1881, 1839 and 1840.
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This entry incorporates text from “Auguste Mariette” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.