CLERMONT-GANNEAU, CHARLES. - Orientalist, born in Paris on 17 Feb. 1846, died there on 15 Feb. 1923. From 1890 he taught Syriac and Semitic antiquities at the Collège de France. From 1906 to 1908 he directed excavations at Elephantine.
His greatest glory remains the discovery, in 1869, while he was chancery-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 he made of it immediately, before the Bedouins could smash it, enabled its decipherment. In 1871 in Jerusalem he discovered one of the stelae that prohibited Gentiles from entering the forecourt reserved for Jews in the Temple (cf. Acts 21:27-30). In 1880 he took the cast of the inscription found in the tunnel that carried water from the Virgin’s Spring to the Pool of Siloam. At Jaffa, in the excavations he directed in 1873–74, he uncovered the Jewish necropolis; in 1871 he established the location of Gezer at Tell Gezer.
He contributed to the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum and to numerous journals. About 1,500 articles and publications attest to his learning and critical sense.