Annie Caubet

Annie Caubet worked on the Louvre's Cypriot antiquities from the department of Oriental Antiquities for nearly four decades, from 1968 to 2006. She passed the concours des conservateurs in 1964 and trained at the Laboratoire des Musées de France and in the Greek and Roman and Egyptian departments, the last under J.-L. de Cénival¹. In 1968 she entered the Oriental department as a curator, at a time when it was directed by Pierre Amiet¹.

Her work on Cyprus began in the field. From 1969 she took part in the excavations of the Salamis mission, and she is recorded there until 1973¹. From 1976 she belonged to the French excavations at Kition-Bamboula, run from the University of Lyon II under Marguerite Yon, and she is listed among the staff of the May-June 1981 campaign^1,4. She was author of Kition-Bamboula III, on the LN 13 sounding and the Late Bronze Age and Geometric I levels, published in 1987, and was later preparing the publication of the sanctuaries of Astarte and Melqart¹. Elsewhere in the Near East she worked at Emar-Meskéné (1972-74), Ugarit (from 1978), Failaka (1980-82), Mehrgar (1984) and Susa (1986)¹.

Counting Cyprus in France

On arriving at the Louvre she began an inventory of Cypriot antiquities in French collections. In March 1971 she wrote about it to Olivier Masson, having received from Simone Besques a list of Cypriot objects on deposit; Masson answered that the undertaking threatened to become a "Tour de France"³. In 1975-76 she wrote the catalogue of the Louvre's touring exhibition of Cypriot antiquities, shown at Angoulême, Calais and Marseille⁵. She also published La religion à Chypre dans l'antiquité (Lyon, 1979)⁵.

In 1993 she contributed an essay to Archéologie française à Chypre on the Cypriot antiquities in the Louvre and in other French public collections. It explains why the Cypriot material belongs to the Oriental department and how nineteenth-century collecting formed it². A later survey of Cypriot objects in France, by Anne-Elisabeth Dunn-Vaturi, continued the inventory Caubet had started³. In 2005 Caubet identified, from photographs of old labels, two Cypriot terracottas deposited in the museum at Dinan as coming from the mission of Edmond Duthoit³. In a volume published in 2011, R. Counts thanked her for giving him access to departmental files at the Louvre that held copies of Duthoit's sketches of Malloura⁶. She also helped Robert Merrillees with his 1992 article on a Late Cypriote figurine with child from the Boysset Collection⁵.

The department at the Louvre

In 1986 Caubet took charge of the Oriental Antiquities department as Conservateur général. Under her direction the reserves, archives and displays were reorganised for the Grand Louvre, in stages dated 1989, 1993, 1999 and 2002; the Sackler wing, which includes the Cypriot galleries, opened in 1999¹. She also prepared files on stone sculpture, terracottas, faience and ivory and passed them to other researchers¹.

From 1 January 2006 she was detached from the Louvre to the Institut national d'histoire de l'art¹. In June 2007 an international colloquium in Paris honoured her, and volume 37 of the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes was dedicated to her as Hommage à Annie Caubet; its organisers were Antoine Hermary, Sabine Fourrier, Robert Merrillees and Marguerite Yon¹.