Albert Terrien de Lacouperie

Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie (23 November 1844 – 11 October 1894) was a French orientalist, specialising in comparative philology. He published a number of books on early Asian and Middle-Eastern languages, initially in French and then in English. Lacouperie is best known for his studies of the Yi Ching and his argument, known as Sino-Babylonianism, that the important elements of ancient civilization in ancient China came from Mesopotamia and that there were resemblances between Chinese characters and Akkadian hieroglyphics.

The American sinologist E. Bruce Brooks writes that Lacouperie "gained a sufficiently accurate view of the Spring and Autumn period that he realized, half a century before Chyen Mu and Owen Lattimore, that the 'Chinese' territory of that period was in fact honeycombed with non-Sinitic peoples and even states." Brooks concluded that the "whole trend of Lacouperie's thought still provokes a collective allergic reaction in Sinology and its neighbor sciences; only now are some of the larger questions he raised, and doubtless mishandled, coming to be hesitantly askable."