Nicolas Mahudel
Nicolas Mahudel (21 November 1673 – 7 March 1747) was a French Roman Catholic priest and antiquary interested in prehistoric research. He proposed the chronological prehistoric sequence Stone Age - Bronze Age - Iron Age. Mahudel was for a time a Jesuit and later in his life a Trappist.
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Biography
Nicolas Mahudel was born on 21 November 1673 in Langres. He became a physician in Montpellier, and then moved to Lyon in 1709. He later moved to Paris, where he ended his career.
Mahudel was interested in the study of antiquity and was one of the precursors of prehistoric research. Taking up certain ideas of ancient authors such as Lucretius, he envisaged a chronological succession of several prehistoric ages, including a Stone Age, a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, without however questioning the biblical account.[1] Proposing this succession around 1714–1720, he read a presentation of this work at a public hearing at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on November 12, 1734.[2] They were published by the Academy in 1740, under the title Les Monuments les plus anciens de l'industrie des hommes, des Arts et reconnus dans les pierres de Foudre.
By his works of archaeological classification, he widened the concepts emitted by Antoine de Jussieu, who had published in 1723 his research entitled De l'Origine et des usages de la Pierre de Foudre.
With his work Three Successive Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron (1734), he influenced fellow antiquaries, notably William Borlase who further developed this idea.
During the 18th century still, controversy was vivid as to whether thunder-stones had been made by men or were actually fossils. Mahudel, member of the Académie des Inscriptions, presented several of those stones and showed that they have evidently been cut by the hand of man. "An examination of them," he said, "affords a proof of the efforts of our earliest ancestors to provide for their wants, and to obtain the necessaries of life."
He established the stone - bronze - iron sequence after he had compared several burial sites. He noticed that graves with decayed urns largely featured bronze items, whereas iron was found in more recent ones. Mahudel also wrote on historical subjects, particularly on the history of cocoa and sugar.
He was interested in the study of numismatics and classified European coins. His work Dissertation historique sur les monnoyes antiques d'Espagne was published in 1725. His historical research on coins influenced the Danish historian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, who in turn studied the history of coins, especially the bracteates discovered in Scandinavia.
Nicolas Mahudel died on 7 March 1747 in Paris.[3][4]
Notes
- ↑ Schnapp, Alain (1993). La Conquête du Passé: Aux Origines de l'Archéologie. Paris: Éditions Carré.
- ↑ Beaune, Sophie A. de (2010). Écrire le Passé. La Fabrique de la Préhistoire et de l'Histoire à Travers les Siècles. Paris: CNRS Éditions, p. 17.
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References
- Estrée, Paul d' (1897). Les Tribulations d'un Académicien: Les Procès de Nicolas Mahudel. Paris: H. Champion.
External links
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