Antoine Hermary

After the Turkish invasion of 1974, which Hermary's own history of the school calls "les tragiques événements de 1974", the director of the École française d'Athènes, Pierre Amandry, and the director of the Department of Antiquities, Vassos Karageorghis, chose Amathus, which Hermary describes as the only great site of the island not yet systematically dug outside its necropoleis¹⁶. The direction of the mission went to Pierre Aupert, then secretary general of the school, and from 1975 its funding was shared between the school and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs¹⁶. Karageorghis wrote that Aupert was "rejoint plus tard" by Hermary, another member of the school²⁰. Hermary later wrote that for all who took part in the first campaigns, the work was inseparable from meeting a Cypriot people he called "hospitalier, courageux et fier de ses traditions"²¹. The first and largest excavations were in the sanctuary of Aphrodite on the hilltop and in the palace about 200 m lower²¹.

The excavation report for 1978 records that Hermary completed the catalogue of the Amathus sculptures²². In 1979 he and Marie-Christine Hellmann ran the sanctuary of Aphrodite on the summit of the acropolis, where the spring campaign lasted from 24 April to 1 June²³. A photograph he took that year shows Aupert, Hermary, Karageorghis and Hellmann at Amathus¹⁶. From 1979 to 2002 Aupert and Hermary co-directed the mission¹⁶.

The campaign of 1980, led by Hermary with D. Mulliez, lasted six weeks, from 21 April to 30 May, and set out to go on uncovering the monumental temple, part of whose north wall had come to light in 1979²⁴. The fifth campaign in the sanctuary, in May 1981, was meant above all to fix the dimensions of the great temple²⁵. Hermary and M. Schmid presented the state of the work at the Second International Congress of Cypriot Studies at Nicosia in April 1982^17,25. The sixth campaign ran from 26 April to 28 May 1982, with a study season in September and October²⁶. In 1983 the ministry generally suspended excavation, and the mission turned to classifying and studying its finds²⁷. The 1984 campaign in the sanctuary lasted five weeks with some twenty workmen, and under a new Cypriot law a Cypriot archaeologist, Anne Destrooper-Georgiadis, was associated with the mission²⁸.

Campaigns on the summit of the acropolis followed from 16 September to 11 October 1985 and from 6 May to 13 June 1986^29,30. The tenth, from 17 April to 12 June 1987, reported by Hermary, T. Petit and M. Schmid, found a small natural cave a few metres south-east of the stair of the Roman temple; bones, sherds and fragments of terracotta figurines showed that its entrance had been blocked by the end of the Archaic period³¹. Laurence Rebillard later studied the Archaic pottery from the cave "fouillée en 1987 par Antoine Hermary"³². The 1988 campaign, from 18 April to 20 May, aimed to finish the excavation of the basilica, and a brief campaign in the sanctuary followed from 18 to 29 September 1989^33,34. In 1992 there was only a very short campaign, from 13 to 18 April³⁵. During a stay from 6 April to 6 May 1996 he finalised his manuscript on the terracottas and sculptures, and he and Schmid did some cleaning on the temple of Aphrodite³⁶.

The results went into three volumes of the series: Amathonte II, the sculptures found before 1975, with a contribution by V. Tatton-Brown (Paris, 1981); Amathonte V, the Archaic and Classical terracotta figurines and the stone sculptures (Athens and Paris, 2000); and Amathonte VI, on the sanctuary of Aphrodite, with Sabine Fourrier and other collaborators (Athens, 2006)¹⁷. Karageorghis judged that Hermary's studies had brought new light on the religion of ancient Amathus²⁰.

Fourrier directed the mission from 2003 to 2007, and Hermary directed it again from 2008¹⁶. In 2010 fieldwork was very limited, chiefly a month at the palace with a small team, while a new programme on the topography of the necropoleis began with the Department of Antiquities and studies for a partial anastylosis of the temple of Aphrodite went on with the Greek Ministry of Culture³⁷. In 2014 that study of the necropoleis was under his direction and that of Yiannis Violaris²¹. He also wrote the chapter on Amathus as capital of a kingdom and city-state in Lemesos: A History of Limassol (Cambridge, 2015)¹⁷.

His catalogue of the Cypriot sculptures in the Louvre's Department of Oriental Antiquities appeared in Paris in 1989¹⁷. With A. Caubet and Karageorghis he published Art antique de Chypre au Musée du Louvre in 1992¹⁷.

In 2014 he and Joan R. Mertens published The Cesnola Collection of Cypriot Art: Stone Sculpture with Yale University Press, the second instalment of the Metropolitan Museum's electronic publication of the Luigi Palma di Cesnola collection, after the terracottas of 2004^17,38. Hermary wrote the introduction and the catalogue except some of the stone vases, and Mertens dealt with the remaining vases, supervised the photography and took part in the production¹⁰. The catalogue includes all 635 stone pieces of the collection³⁹. In Turin he consulted the album of photographs of finds from the "temple of Venus at Golgos" that Cesnola sent there in September 1870¹⁰.

In his foreword Karageorghis wrote that no one but Hermary could have undertaken the work, and called the 1989 Louvre catalogue "still a basic handbook"³⁸. He added that despite Hermary's "exhaustive research" the exact provenance of each piece was still uncertain³⁸. A. Satraki called Hermary "the par-excellence authority on Cypriot sculpture" and reported his argument that the chronology of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition should be updated, but held reservations about some of his reference points, such as the Palaepaphos "siege mound" and the building of the Vouni palace³⁹. D. B. Counts called his treatment of Cesnola's activities around Golgoi and Athienou "a must-read" and credited him with a "steady hand" on the chronology of Cypriot sculpture⁴⁰.

From 1985 Hermary wrote on earlier excavators, beginning with Venetian digging in Cyprus in the 16th century¹⁷. With Olivier Masson he published Ludwig Ross's journey to Cyprus in 1845 and Max Ohnefalsch-Richter's excavations at Idalion in 1894, both in 1988, and alone he wrote on the Vogüé mission of 1862, on a history of studies of Cypriot sculpture (1990) and on a lot of Louvre antiquities from the Hoffmann sale of March 1890¹⁷.

At the general assembly of the Centre d'Études Chypriotes at the Louvre on 14 November 1998, Michel Amandry was elected president and Hermary vice-president, and the Cahier was given an editorial committee around Hermary as director of publication⁴¹. He edited the Cahiers annually with Marguerite Yon from 1997¹⁷. When Amandry stepped down at the assembly held at Lyon on 20 June 2002, Hermary was elected to replace him⁴². In 2016, still president, he announced that the first 43 volumes of the Cahier had been put online⁴³. In 2020 the masthead named him editor-in-chief⁴⁴.

According to the authority record he was at the CNRS from 1980 to 1991, professor at the Université de Provence from 1991, and director of the Centre Camille Jullian from 1994 to 1999¹⁸. There he worked on Massalia and its metropolis Phocaea, and on the terracotta figurines of Megara Hyblaea in Sicily¹⁹. By 2015 he was professor emeritus of Greek archaeology at Aix-Marseille⁴⁵. On 16 and 17 October 2015 colleagues, friends and students met at Marseille, in the auditorium of the Musée d'Histoire, to honour him¹⁹. The editors of the volume credited his work with much of a change of view that saw Cyprus as an active centre and "non pas seulement vecteur et récepteur"¹⁹.