Edme-François Jomard

He was educated at the collège Mazarin, the École nationale des ponts et chaussées and the École polytechnique. He took part in Napoleon's commission to Egypt. He later worked at the Bibliothèque nationale.[2]

The publication of the landmark, outsized Description de l'Égypte (Description of Egypt) was decreed by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. This seminal publication on Egyptology was a collaboration effort of some 150 prominent French scientist and scholars and 2,000 technicians and artists. It is the record of Bonaparte's Commission des Sciences et des Arts that accompanied the ill-fated French campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798-1801)."[3]

Jomard was one of the founding members of the Société de Géographie in Paris. With the Irish exile and former American consul David Baillie Warden, Jonard was behind the society's patronage of studies of indigenous America, especially Palenque and the Yucatán Peninsula.[4]

Through his membership of the society, he was also involved in awarding the French explorer, René Caillié, the 10,000 Franc prize for being the first European to return from Timbuktu. He contributed to, and edited, Caillié's account of his travels, Journal d'un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné dans l'Afrique Centrale, ... which was published in 1830. The work was translated into English and published as Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo; and across the Great Desert, to Morocco,....[5]

Jomard was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society[6] in 1829 and the American Antiquarian Society[7] in 1855.

The Jomard Award was established by the Société de Géographie in 1882 for auxiliary sciences and services provided to the French Geographical Society ("Prix pour les sciences auxiliares et pour services rendus á la Société de Géographie").[8]

• List of Egyptologists

• Quella-Villéger, Alain (2012), René Caillié, l'Africain : une vie d'explorateur, 1799-1838 (in French), Anglet, France: Aubéron, ISBN 978-2-84498-137-0