Antinoé, momies, textiles, céramiques et autres antiques (book)

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Antinoé, momies, textiles, céramiques et autres antiquités / Antinoe, mummies, textiles, ceramics and other antiques (book) by Yannick Lintz, Magali Coudert. Publishers: Musée Du Louvre Editions and Somogy editions. 2013. Dimensions: 27.8 x 20.7 x 4.8 cm. 599 pages. New in blister. Text in French.

Antinoe, a prestigious site in Middle Egypt, has been explored by various excavators, almost without interruption from 1895 to the present day. Despite inevitable clandestine excavations, this place has been relatively preserved during the modern period. The collection of works and mummies studied in this book comes from the necropolises of the ancient city of Antinoe and represents a corpus of more than five thousand objects.

This archaeological material, which arrived in France at the beginning of the 20th century, was distributed by the French State to various museums and universities in the national territory, and more widely in Europe, or subsequently deposited by the Louvre Museum. This unpublished collection, rediscovered thanks to checks and checks on the inventories of the Louvre’s deposits and State shipments, covers the Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic periods. It perfectly illustrates the remarkable diversity of objects found on the site: rich clothing with varied decorations and shimmering colors admirably preserved, which still adorn several of the mummies studied, sometimes also covered in gilding, funerary masks painted with the effigy of the deceased, portraits of the deceased and other pieces, from their tombs, which accompanied them into the afterlife. This work offers the most exhaustive vision possible of this collection, which is ultimately relatively little known from a strictly archaeological and anthropological point of view. It also allows us to clarify the history of the arrival of the products of the excavations in France and the methods of their distribution. Several scientific investigations were conducted by the Louvre as part of this study, in order to improve our knowledge of the population and ancient culture of Antinoe. The historical and archival approaches, supplemented by numerous summary documents, are intended to provide readers, particularly researchers, with benchmarks and tools resulting from this research. Initiated by a review of inventory and archive funds, and followed by a scientific study of the works, this work will have lasted more than fifteen years. These valuable sources of information allow us to revisit Late Antiquity, a period of transition between a pagan world and a world that had become Christian.