Edmond Pottier

In August 1878 Edmond Pottier, then a member of the French School at Athens, crossed Cyprus with Mondry Beaudouin copying inscriptions. Their route ran from Larnaca to Nicosia by way of the Paphos region and the Karpas, and by November the two men had gathered about a hundred unpublished texts^4,7. At Kouklia they inspected the sanctuary of Aphrodite, and their travel journal in the School's archives holds a sketch plan of the ruins⁵. In Larnaca he recorded a glass vessel with a Greek inscription owned by a Mr Mattei, which Alessandro Palma di Cesnola then bought⁴. The inscriptions appeared in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique in 1879¹⁰, and on his return Pottier remarked that private collections on the island were growing and would soon be resold on the European market⁹.

In 1884 he joined Léon Heuzey's Louvre department as collaborator and took over the ancient ceramics^1,3. Between 1893 and 1923 he sent about 80 Cypriot vases, figurines and statuette heads to 18 French towns and university faculties of letters¹. In 1893 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter thanked him in the preface to Kypros, the Bible and Homer for valuable help¹¹. Pottier re-edited Heuzey's catalogue of terracotta figurines in 1923³ and published the Louvre's Cypriot pottery in two fascicles of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, in 1926 and 1928². He lived from 1855 to 1934¹.