Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852), the son of a French classicist, published works on the Pali language of the Theravada Buddhists, on Zoroastrian liturgy in the Avesta, and on Sanskrit mythological texts, for which he was appointed professor of the Sanskrit language at the Collège de France (1832–1852).
Orientalists as Diplomats and Administrators in Asia
Some of the first Orientalists got their start accompanying diplomatic missions to Asia. Antoine Galland (1646–1715), a French scholar who accompanied the French ambassador to Constantinople in 1670–1675, studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish there. He later published Mille et une nuits, the first translation of Arabian Nights' Entertainments into a European language, as well as French translations of collections of Indian fables and the Qur'an. Likewise, Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783–1835), a German who had taken part in a Russian visit to China in 1805, published a two-volume ethnographic and linguistic study of the Caucasus.
In other cases, Orientalists went to Asia as army officers or colonial administrators. Sir William Jones (1746–1794), an English scholar and translator of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian who became a British supreme-court judge in Calcutta, undertook the study of Sanskrit to compile an authoritative digest of Hindu law that might be used in the courts.
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