André Parrot

Elisabeth Fontan writes that at the end of the war Parrot worked to complete the programme planned by H. Verne so that all the renovated oriental galleries could open for the centenary of the Musée Assyrien in June 1947¹. The last room of the Rivoli wing, then numbered XIX, stayed devoted to Cypriot art, the large female statue from Idalion stood on the landing of the east staircase, and the Cypriot pottery went into a room of comparative ceramics¹. Parrot himself described twelve heads of men and women set around the basin ("vasque") as "a sort of garland of stone" in which each face was a distinct element of a style, as Fontan quotes him¹. Further changes followed in later years, notably after some 900 objects from Enkomi came to the Louvre in the division of finds¹.

In 1948 Claude Schaeffer told Georges Salles that Parrot, to whom he had handed the bronze hoard found at Enkomi the year before for cleaning, did not dare have the work done; Schaeffer wrote that he understood Parrot's reluctance to take responsibility for objects not yet assigned to the Louvre, and that the cost might burden his budget⁶. Schaeffer told Porphyrios Dikaios the same year that the cleaned hoard, awaiting division, was at the Louvre with Parrot or with Nougayrol⁷.

In 1953 a letter from the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, signed apparently by A. H. S. Megaw, passed on word from Ashmole that the silver bowl was ready for despatch to the Louvre and that Parrot would have a telephone call from the Embassy⁸. In 1958 Schaeffer passed on to Megaw Parrot's report that the bronze throne could not be copied by electrotype, and Parrot's decision that the offered Stylianou bronzes were not worth accepting without the inscribed pieces^9,10. A receipt of 1958 records Mycenaean vases from Enkomi Tomb 2 (1949) given to the Louvre subject to the approval of the Commission des Fouilles, received by the chief curator¹¹.

Olivier Masson recalled that in the 1950s J. Vendryes sent him to the Louvre, where Parrot and his women colleagues, reorganising the department, wanted a volunteer to identify and reclassify the then dusty Cypriot stones; that was how Masson came to know the Cypriot antiquities that occupied him afterwards¹². In 1962 Vassos Karageorghis thanked Parrot, "conservateur en chef" of the department, for leave to study and photograph the Mycenaean krater from Aradhippou in the Louvre¹³.

The sources disagree on when Parrot took over the Commission des fouilles: Ludovic Thély says it passed to him in 1959, after Henri Laugier and then Schaeffer, while French Wikipedia gives 1958^4,5. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres elected him in 1963¹⁴. That year Schaeffer's note on the 1962 Enkomi season went to Parrot for the Commission, and on 24 September Parrot wrote that he could easily picture Schaeffer at Enkomi, "of which we keep such a good memory"^15,16. On 6 October Schaeffer announced the sixteenth Enkomi season to the academicians through Parrot, and his notebook drafts a telegram asking Parrot to inform the Académie and the press of an important statue found in an Iron Age sanctuary^17,18.

Signing as Secretary General of the Commission in 1968, Parrot announced grants for 1969 of 69,726 francs for Enkomi and 109,259 francs for Ras Shamra, the requests cut by 15% on ministerial instructions¹⁹. In 1971 he sent Olivier Pelon the proofs of the report on the 21st Enkomi season²⁰. Liliane Courtois, thanking him that year as Director General of the Louvre, named him her sponsor at the CNRS for her study of Cypriot pottery; French Wikipedia makes him director of the Louvre from 1968 to 1972^5,21. Pierre Amandry, in a letter quoted by Thély, wrote that when the French School at Athens declined Amathus, Karageorghis "alerted Parrot, who alerted the Quai", and new diplomatic approaches followed⁴.

Reviewing Karageorghis's Chypre in 1969, Parrot wrote that no one was more competent to write it than a scholar whose homeland the island was and who lived and dug there²². Will records that Parrot joined the board of Syria in 1942 and was its director from 1973, and that he died on 24 August 1980 in his eightieth year³.