Ernest Renan

Ernest Renan directed the Mission de Phénicie, and in December 1861 he handed its Cyprus campaign to Melchior de Vogüé by letter². He told Vogüé that the firman and a letter from Fuad Pasha were held by Charles Gaillardot, that Sosthène Grasset was to be attached to the party, and that the budget was about 8,000 francs. Vogüé was to take squeezes of every inscription. Renan wrote that "our mission is one of exploration, not purchase" and that purchases should be made with reserve and only for objects of real scientific interest². On 10 April 1862 he reported that the Academy was pleased with Vogüé's first letter from Cyprus and that the Cypriot inscription "must be had at any price"³.

On 1 August 1862 Renan wrote that he hesitated to cut the inscriptions out of their tombs at Nea Paphos, citing the memory of Lord Elgin. Grasset had offered the statue from Athienou at 500 francs, and Renan left the price and the decision to Vogüé, saying that a purchase from the mission's own budget would be too heavy and that he would pass Vogüé's opinion to the Louvre³. Vogüé bought it with his own money; it reached France in 1866 and he gave it to the Louvre in 1880³. In the same letter he promised a Book V of the Mission's publication on Cyprus; on 15 Oct 1863 he wrote that he was still working on it, and it never appeared³.

Renan met Luigi Palma di Cesnola in Paris in 1876, when Cesnola showed the Curium gold to the Louvre authorities and to Renan in person⁵. In 1876 he also wrote that Julius Euting's copies of Cypriot inscriptions were so inexact that he supposed a Cypriot forger was trying to deceive European science, as Marangou paraphrases the article⁵. On 11 May 1880, as editor of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, he asked Alexander Palma di Cesnola for photographs of the Phoenician lead rolls and inscribed jars of the Lawrence-Cesnola collection before the Cyprus chapter went to press⁶. He was born at Tréguier in 1823 and died in Paris on 2 October 1892¹.