Troubles with Time: Universal History and Chronology at the Académie des Inscriptions

The Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres—a French national academy that was originally founded as part of King Louis XIV’s image-making campaign in 1663—dramatically transformed the way in which Enlightenment historians understood the past. When the members of the Académie des inscriptions began looking beyond the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, they encountered a number of inconsistences and conflicts that profoundly destabilized Judeo-Christian universal histories. Attempts to reconcile the biblical and non-European timelines of the Indian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern civilizations deeply preoccupied scholars of the early Enlightenment. Indeed, the question of universal chronology was on of interest to a wide variety of scholars in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, including Isaac Newton, who attempted to correct the timeline of the world in his Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728). Nicolas Fréret, a prominent member of the Académie who attempted to refute Newton’s hypothesis, became one of the most active researchers of this question. The paper will look at the ways in which Fréret and other historians of antiquity of the Académie des inscriptions attempted to reconcile the various ancient non-Judeo-Christian chronologies with the biblical timeline.