CLERMONT-GANNEAU, CHARLES

CLERMONT-GANNEAU, CHARLES. - Orientalist, b. in Paris on 17 February 1846, d. there on 15 February 1923. From 1890 he taught Semitic epigraphy and antiquities at the Collège de France. From 1906 to 1908 he directed the excavations of Elephantine.

His greatest glory remains the discovery, in 1869, while he was chancellor-interpreter at the French consulate in Jerusalem, of the important stele of Mesha, king of Moab, made at Dhiban (biblical Dibon) in Transjordan; the cast made of it immediately by C., before the Bedouins shattered it, allowed its decipherment. In 1871 in Jerusalem he discovered one of the steles that prohibited Gentiles from entering the court reserved for the Jews in the Temple (cf. Acts 21:27-30). In 1880 he oversaw the cast of the inscription found in the tunnel that carried water from the Virgin's Fountain to the Pool of Siloam. At Jaffa, in the excavations he directed in 1873-74, he discovered the Jewish necropolis; in 1871 he established the location of Gezer at Tell-Gezer.

He collaborated on the Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum and on numerous journals. Some 1500 articles and publications attest to his scholarship and his critical sense.

Francesco Spadafora