Pierre Briant

Pierre Briant (born 30 September 1940 in Angers) is a French Iranologist, Professor of History and Civilisation of the Achaemenid World and the Empire of Alexander the Great at the Collège de France (1999 onwards), Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Chicago, and founder of the website achemenet.com.

He studied history at the University of Poitiers (1960–1965). After teaching at the Lycée Joffre in Montpellier (1965-1967), he spent seven years as a lecturer at the University of Tours. He completed his doctoral thesis in 1972. Appointed Professor of the History of Antiquity at the University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail in 1974, he taught there for 25 years before becoming Professor at the Collège de France.

He has published extensively on the Achaemenid Empire, the history of Alexander the Great and his successors, as well as the Hellenistic Era.

In the words of Matthew Stolper, Briant "has shown a generation of scholars once isolated from each other that they are members of a common intellectual project of great consequence."