Louis de Mas Latrie

Louis de Mas Latrie reached Cyprus in 1845 and left behind a small group of ancient objects in Paris and a failed attempt to buy the Sargon stele for France. He was born at Castelnaudary on 9 April 1815 and died in Paris on 3 January 1897¹⁰. His name belongs mainly to the history of Lusignan Cyprus, and the antiquities were a side interest of a historian and palaeographer.

He reached Larnaca on 29 October 1845, a short time after the stele of Sargon II had been found there, and returned to France in early April 1846². He sent the Minister a drawing of the stele on 18 April 1846². The French consuls Dagobert Fourcade, consul until 1845, and Théodore Goëpp, who took over the post that year, helped him; he also used a memoir on the island that Fourcade had written in 1844¹. Amandry, Hermary and Masson note that he left no running account of the trip, and that what is known comes from letters, reports and allusions in his later book¹. They describe him as interested above all in geography and history; he visited the main sites and drew a map¹. Ludwig Ross, who had published an account of his own travels, was his immediate predecessor on the island¹.

With the Sardinian consul Marcello Cerruti he had small excavations made at Dali, the village on the site of ancient Idalion; several of the objects later given in Paris came from them^1,2. Cerruti's own large collection went to Turin in 1847².

The stele was the larger matter. Mas Latrie told the Minister that 1,200 or 1,500 francs would probably close the purchase, while the owners, the Mattei family, were asking two or three thousand talaris. The Académie des Inscriptions adopted Letronne's proposal to ask for it. By then the Prussian consul had bought it for 7,000 francs, on Ross's application². Marangou has Mas Latrie visiting in 1846 and witnessing the discovery, but Merrillees shows that he arrived after it^2,3.

On 5 June 1846 Charles Lenormant showed several of the objects to the Académie des Inscriptions and read a notice announcing the gift¹. The register of gifts to the Cabinet des antiques for 1846 lists seven pieces: a limestone statuette of a woman holding a flower (Fossati 761), a marble foot (687), two small limestone heads (692 and 690), a large terracotta head (5658), a marble head of Hercules (689) and a terracotta fragment (5659)¹. They are now in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale de France¹. The Académie notice also named a marble head of Venus from Kition and a head of Jupiter from Salamis, neither of which is in the Cabinet; Amandry and his co-authors can only suppose that Mas Latrie did not give them¹. Mas Latrie wrote that the Venus head, of Parian marble, came to him through the friendship of Niven Kerr, the British consul¹. According to Merrillees it later belonged to Benjamin Delessert, who acquired it from Mas Latrie in the late 1840s, and it was sold in London by S. Leigh Sotheby and J. Wilkinson on 20 July 1848 (lot 22) to a buyer named Rutter. Its present location is not known².

His Cyprus work went into print over the following decades: the "Notes d'un voyage archéologique en Orient" in 1850, the three volumes of the Histoire de l'île de Chypre sous les Lusignans between 1852 and 1861, a notice on the construction of a map of the island in 1862, and L'île de Chypre in 1879^12,13,14,15. The 1862 map was the one on which the route of Melchior de Vogüé's expedition was plotted, and Vogüé counted him among his occasional correspondents⁶. His Cyprus correspondence was published in 1997¹⁶.