Edmond Duthoit

When the Vogüé-Waddington mission left Cyprus for Syria in March 1862, the man who stayed behind to do the digging was its draughtsman, Edmond Duthoit. Foucart-Borville, who published his Cypriot letters, puts it in Duthoit's own words: left alone for a time, he had to take charge of everything, excavation and drawing¹.

Duthoit was born at Amiens on 1 May 1837 into a family of sculptor-decorators, studied at Jesuit colleges, and in September 1857 entered the Paris agency of Viollet-le-Duc, where he stayed until about 1872¹. Viollet-le-Duc recommended him to Melchior de Vogüé. The three men divided the work: Vogüé took history, description and photography, Duthoit the drawings, and William Waddington the inscriptions¹. They sailed from Marseille on 22 December 1861 and landed at Larnaca on 28 January 1862, where Duthoit lodged with the French consul¹. After a six-week tour of the island, Vogüé and Waddington left on the day after 10 March, and Duthoit stayed for the excavations¹.

From about 9 March he was settled at Athienou with a house, a dragoman, an accountant, a cook, a muleteer and a soldier, and 100 to 150 workmen on three points¹. Golgoi, where Vogüé had expected most, gave only badly built foundations. On his own initiative he opened two further digs, at Ayios Photios and Malloura, and told Vogüé so; at Malloura the farmers said the heads Vogüé had bought came from the place⁴. By 24 March he had 60 to 80 heads and about fifteen limbless statues, and by May 150 to 200 heads¹. He found the heads, limbs and torsos in separate pits and at first took this for deliberate destruction by a Christian sect of the third or fourth century. The editors of his letters read the pits as deposits of old votives cleared from sanctuaries¹. He later moved on to Arsos, where he found phallic ex-votos with Greek dedications, and to Dali, where he dug a hill and tombs and found bronze arrow- and lance-heads and a scarab⁴.

Holding an imperial firman, he wrote, he made a peasant sell him a capital built into a wall for 20 francs, and that this scene had been repeated three or four times; he also bought heads at 10 to 20 sous¹. At Soli, with Sosthène Grasset, he had the Cypriot syllabic inscription loaded over the objection of the local official, by his own account threatening to have him dismissed¹. At Palaipaphos he cleared the Spilaion tis Reginas, and at Amathus he removed four inscriptions from house walls by force; in May a navy ship took the cases on board at Kouklia¹. Vogüé wrote that Duthoit had overcome the ill will of officials and inhabitants by his great authority¹. Grasset later called the Golgoi dig sterile, but Foucart-Borville treats that as jealous exaggeration¹.

At Amathus he also cleared the two large vases, drew them, and had a wall built round the better one. The French vice-consul claimed it for France and the Pasha protested. The vases had been known for a long time; Duthoit's part was the claim and, later, the removal¹.

In 1865 he returned on a state commission. A letter of 11 March 1865 from the Count of Nieuwerkerke sent him to survey Assos and then to Cyprus to complete the collection "according to the indications of M. de Longpérier", at 1,000 francs a month¹. In July he found a new deposit of statues at Athienou, 50 paces from his trench of 1862: 500 to 600 heads and thousands of fragments over about 1,000 square metres, packed into more than twenty cases¹. He took inscriptions at Polis tis Chrysochou and Lapithos¹. The consul, Louis Dumesnil de Maricourt, tried behind his back to have a frigate lift the vase and failed. Duthoit wrote that until it reached France it was "my property", for which he answered to the government¹. Maricourt then died of cholera, nursed by Duthoit; Duthoit was shunned in Larnaca for it and wrote of leaving a country he had come to hate¹. The vase left on the navy vessel La Perdrix on 30 October 1865 and is in the Louvre as AO 22897^1,11. The cases of statuary waited at Larnaca until a state ship called in July 1866¹.

Vogüé insisted that a room at the Louvre bear the names of Vogüé and Duthoit; it was later renamed the Salle phénicienne et chypriote¹. A bearded head with a vegetal crown, AM 2935, is probably the "Tête de Bacchus indien" of Duthoit's letter of 8 February 1862, according to the Louvre's record¹². His intended publication on Cyprus never appeared. More than a hundred of his Cypriot drawings and watercolours are in the Musée de Picardie at Amiens, and he reported more than 1,200 drawings for the whole 1862 mission, most of them kept by Vogüé and since lost^1,7.

He became attached to the Commission des monuments historiques in 1866, worked at Roquetaillade and Abbadia, and went to Algeria in 1872; he was architect in chief of its historic monuments from 1880 and received the Légion d'honneur in 1882 for his work there^1,9. He worked on the church of Notre-Dame de Brebières at Albert and died at Amiens in June 1889^1,5.