Georges Perrot

Georges Perrot never went to Cyprus, yet he wrote its main French-language synthesis of the 1870s and 1880s. Born in November 1832, a few months after Luigi Palma di Cesnola, he went in 1860 as a member of the French School at Athens to Ancyra and Asia Minor, rather than to Cyprus¹. He became a professor in the Faculty of Letters in Paris and a member of the Institut.

Britain's takeover of the island in 1878 prompted three articles, "L'île de Cypre", in the Revue des Deux Mondes, dated 1 December 1878, 1 February 1879 and 15 May 1879^1,8. The second was courteous to Cesnola and contained details that Olivier Masson thinks came from Cesnola himself¹. It also answered Franz von Löher's claim that the French had destroyed the second Amathus vase². The third regretted that the architect Edmond Duthoit had not drawn the plan of the Golgoi sanctuary and described Cesnola's digging there as "rude et destructrice"^1,4. Cesnola, by then in New York, told Heinrich Schliemann on 7 July 1879 that the article was untruthful, unjust and undeserved. Perrot did not reply in print^1,3.

For the Cyprus volume of the Histoire de l'art dans l'antiquité (1885), written with Charles Chipiez, Cesnola supplied notes and letters, among them letters of 13 August and 21 September 1884 on the Amathus tombs¹. R. S. Merrillees shows that the volume garbled the provenance of the Louvre silver bowls, repeating an earlier error of Perrot's about Saulcy⁵. Perrot died in 1914; his papers were destroyed between then and 1930, so the exchange with Cesnola survives only from Cesnola's side¹.