MÉNANT, JOACHIM (1820–1899), French magistrate and orientalist, was born at Cherbourg on the 16th of April 1820. He was educated for the law, and became vice-president of the civil tribunal of Rouen in 1878, and a member of the cour d’appel three years later. But he became best known by his studies on the cuneiform inscriptions. Among his works on the subject of Assyriology are: Recueil d’alphabets des écritures cunéiformes (1860); Exposé des éléments de la grammaire assyrienne (1868); Le Syllabaire assyrien (2 vols., 1869–1873); Les Langues perdues de la Perse et de l’Assyrie (2 vols., 1885–1886); Les Pierres gravées de la Haute-Asie (2 vols., 1883–1886). He also collaborated with Julius Oppert. He was admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions in 1887, and died in Paris on the 30th of August 1899.
His daughter Delphine (b. 1850) received a prize from the Academy for her Les Parsis, histoire des communautés zoroastriennes de l’Inde (1898), and was sent in 1900–1901 to British India on a scientific mission, of which she published a report in 1903.