For a long time, the activities of foreign archaeological missions and individual diggers were not regulated in Cyprus. As a result, many objects of antiquity from the island found themselves in the collections of museums around the world.
Today we’ll talk about where the Cypriot antiquities came from in the Louvre and several museums of France.
Louvre is one of the largest and most ancient museums in the world. Located in the center of Paris, on the shore of the Seine. A permanent exhibition has 35,000 exhibits. This is only 8% of the entire collection, which contains approximately 445,000 exhibits. Constant expositions occupy 60 600 square meters. m.
The Louvre began to collect objects of Cyprus antiquity earlier than other large museums in Europe - back in 1863. In this he was helped by the French archaeologists-amateurs: Melkior de Vogue, Edmond Dutuetu and the brothers column-Chekaldi. Later, the museum bought antiquity from archaeologists Luigi Palma-Di-Chemolis, Onefalsha Richeter and others.
Thanks to archaeological excavations in the villages of Wuni and Engomi under the leadership of Claude Sheffer and Jean Berara in Paphos, the Louvre collection was involved in ceramics, jewelry, bronze objects, seals. They are exhibited in two halls - the era of the Bronze Age and the era of the Iron Age.
One of the most famous objects taken from Cyprus to Paris is a giant stone bowl from the temple of Aphrodite Amafunta, which got into the museum in 1866.
In addition to the Louvre, Cypriot antiquities are in the collection of the National Library of France, which presents a large number of coins, as well as other metal objects. For example, it is there that a bronze plate of Idalion is stored, on which symbols of Cyprus syllabic writing are cut out on both sides. This is the largest monument with a Cyprus syllabic letter in the world.
The Toulouse Museum contains a clay male bust, probably found in 1890 in the area of ancient Salamin.
The text is prepared based on the materials "Polygno".
This article was first published in the "Vestnik Cyprus" on February 4, 2024. Part of the information could be outdated.
