Melchior de Vogüé

Melchior de Vogüé took over the Cyprus part of Ernest Renan's Mission de Phénicie in 1862, and the stones and sculptures it sent to Paris founded the Louvre's Cypriot collection. Vogüé was born in Paris on 18 October 1829, the son of Léonce de Vogüé, an agriculturalist and ironmaster¹. He was an attaché at St Petersburg from January 1850, was brought home by the coup of 2 December 1851, and made his first Oriental journey from May 1853 to May 1854, during which he may have met the antiquary Aimé Péretié in Beirut¹. He studied at the École des Chartes, learned Greek, Syriac and Hebrew, and published Les églises de Terre Sainte in 1859. His wife died in November 1860, and he left again for the East in late 1861¹.

The mission of 1862

On 17 December 1861 Vogüé wrote that he would go to Cyprus "de mon propre mouvement", answer only to Renan, and spend the whole credit on digging rather than on travel. Renan replied the next day with letters of recommendation, a firman held by Gaillardot and instructions: a complete exploration and copy of all inscriptions first, then excavation, with worthwhile stones to be bought. "À Chypre, vous serez surtout chypriote," he wrote. The budget was 8,000 francs, and ownership of the results would be Vogüé's¹. An itinerary sent to Renan by Sosthène Grasset, who had hoped to lead the mission himself, named the Amathus vase, Kouklia, Soli and Dali among other places, and it shaped the route^1,5.

Vogüé left Marseille on 22 December 1861, sailed from Beirut on 2 January and landed at Larnaca on 28 January 1862 with William Waddington and the architect Edmond Duthoit. The mission lasted until 1 June. On 11 March Vogüé and Waddington left for Syria, and Duthoit, with Grasset, dug at Athienou (Golgoi, Malloura, Ayios Photios, Arsos) and at Dali and then toured the west^2,5. Consular agents helped with permissions, storage and transport: Tardieu at Nicosia, Acamas at Limassol and the consul du Tour at Larnaca^2,5.

At Kouklia the navy aviso Prométhée was placed at his disposal, and the royal epitaphs of Timocharis and Echetimos were taken from the Spilaion tis Regainas⁶. He took the digraphic epitaph of Karyx from Golgoi to Paris (Louvre AM 3341), a piece important for the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabary⁸. The colossal Amathus vase was declared a good prize for France in 1862 and removed in 1865 by Duthoit alone with the navy; it has been in the Louvre since 1866^8,9. Of the votive deposits at Malloura, Vogüé kept about sixty pieces that had no matching fragments⁷.

Paying and giving

The mission accounts for the Cyprus months total 6,900 francs, 4,000 of them for digging. Duthoit says he spent 9,000. A letter from Renan of 15 October 1863 offers to refund sums Vogüé had advanced². Vogüé paid out of his own funds for the seated "statue de M. Grasset" from Athienou; Tardieu ceded his share at cost and Grasset, who was ruined, pressed him. It stayed in the customs house at Larnaca until 1865, reached France in 1866 and was given to the Louvre in 1880². Vogüé insisted that the Louvre label the finds "fouilles de Vogüé et don de Vogüé", and his father disowned the phrase "mission de Vogüé"¹.

Antoine Hermary found that the Louvre's original registry slips of 1863 credit Vogüé with 53 gifts, whereas the report of Alfred de Nieuwerkerke gave 48 of 220 pieces; 31 numbers on those slips, including all the inscriptions, are missing⁷. On 8 March 1870 Vogüé told Charles Clermont-Ganneau that the Louvre's Cypriot collection, "la première qui ait été formée et la plus intéressante qui existe", numbered 700 to 800 pieces and had cost the museum less than 1,000 francs, thanks to gifts from himself, Rey, Waddington and the duc de Luynes².

Dealers and rivals

Demetrios Pierides wrote to him nine times between 1863 and 1866. Pierides held out over three Phoenician inscriptions: Vogüé offered 500 francs on 26 July 1863 and on 8 January 1865 accepted Pierides' price of 750, and the stones went by Marseille to Adrien de Longpérier for the Louvre⁴. Pierides also told him of the Idalion statuettes of Horace White, which White would exchange for Seleucid coins; the Louvre was willing, and the statuettes were in the end sold to Eastwood of London⁴. Bonato names Pierides, Grasset and Péretié as his regular correspondents, with Longpérier advising on the Louvre's behalf and dealing with dealers⁵.

In 1870 Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi, then French consul, showed Vogüé photographs of Luigi Palma di Cesnola's Golgoi finds and passed on his view that the Priest with the Dove (ICS 262) was a capital piece and that Nieuwerkerke would treat for the whole find¹⁰. Péretié's envelope of May 1870 also held Cesnola's plan of the Golgoi temple, which marked "en vert le terrain fouillé par le Milord français", and Cesnola remarked, as Bonato quotes him, that by digging diagonally the Frenchman had destroyed a corner of the temple without knowing it⁵. Cesnola also wrote that "le comte de Vogué a fouillé à Atieno" for several months and found nothing¹⁰, though Vogüé had left for Syria on 11 March and Duthoit did the digging that followed. Löher, in 1878, insinuated that the French destroyed a second Amathus vase when taking the first in 1865, and Cesnola wrote in 1879 of French "vandalism"; Duthoit alone removed the vase in 1865¹⁰. In 1869 Robert Hamilton Lang told Vogüé of the Phoenician-Cypriot bilingual found at Dali, and Marangou writes that Vogüé offered a good price for it; the stone went to the British Museum¹².

Honours and collections

Vogüé published five Phoenician inscriptions from Kition, six from Idalion and eleven Cypriot inscriptions, in the Journal asiatique in 1867 and 1868 and in Mélanges d'archéologie orientale (1868)⁵. He studied the coins of the kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus and of the Phoenician kings of Cyprus; the planned comprehensive volume on Cyprus never appeared⁵. He became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions in 1868, ambassador at Constantinople in 1871 (until 1875) and president of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum in 1892⁵. In 1875 Cesnola wrote to him once, on Boker's introduction, and no further letter is known⁵.

His coin collection of 1,664 pieces went to the Cabinet des Médailles, among them 41 antique Cypriot coins, three of them of Evagoras. His antiquities passed to his daughter Marthe de MacMahon, and about thirty small Cypriot pieces, among them heads, kourotrophoi and tympanon and lyre players, are now in the Musée Rolin at Autun with no recorded findspots. Bonato assumes that some came from Dali or Athienou and that others were bought on the spot or later through consulates and dealers such as Lambros and Péretié⁵. Vogüé died in Paris on 10 November 1916. In Salomon Reinach's obituary he is quoted as saying that he "ran to Cyprus to finish M. Renan's business"¹³.