Napoléon Antoine Aimé Péretié

Aimé Péretié, a dragoman of the French consulate at Beirut, bought the Idalion bronze tablet and sold it in 1850 to the duc de Luynes; it is now in the Cabinet des Médailles as Bronzes 2297^1,6. A landowner called Hadjigiorkis was reported to have found it before 1850 on the west acropolis of Idalion⁶.

Péretié was born at Marseille in 1808. His family moved to Tartous in 1816, where his merchant father lost his fortune¹. Around 1829 he went to Larnaca as private secretary to the French consul Méchain and worked there as an unofficial dragoman and chancellor. In 1831 he married Marie Carpani, whose family, of Cephallonian origin, lived in Larnaca, and their son Alfred was born there in January 1832¹. Older literature confuses the two men, and H. Cassimatis, whose study is the main source for his life, takes care to separate the antiquarian Aimé from his son Alfred, later French consul at Larnaca¹. Other authors print his forenames as Antoine or Achille; Cassimatis shows that Aimé was the name he used¹.

A career in the consulates

Lamartine, visiting Cyprus in 1832, lobbied ministers to obtain him a permanent post. In 1834 Péretié became auxiliary dragoman at Tripoli in Syria, where he stayed until 1839. He was dragoman and chancellor at Jerusalem in 1843, and from 1844 at Beirut. He remained at Beirut until his death in April 1882, by then first dragoman and chancellor, an officer of the Légion d'honneur and an honorary consul¹. His daughter Louise married Edmond de Perthuis in 1853¹.

Consular salaries were low, and Cassimatis writes that dealing in antiquities was accepted and even encouraged. Péretié had excavations made for him at Beirut, Sidon and Tortosa, sometimes joining his workmen, and L. Bonato dates the start of his own collection to 1844^1,3. Cypriot objects were brought to him at Beirut, and a letter of May 1868 says he bought some himself in Cyprus¹. He sent lots to Paris auctions in 1851, 1854, 1855 and 1856, and probably later, and he gave pieces to the Louvre¹. Bonato names him and Dimitri Pierides as suppliers to Western museums and collectors³. R. Hamilton Lang, writing in 1878, called him "certainly the most intelligent and successful collector of antiquities in Syria"⁹.

Cypriot objects

The tablet was not his only Cypriot sale. Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi wrote that one of fourteen silver bowls found at Dali was bought by Péretié and passed to Luynes⁵. Adrien de Longperier, for his part, reported in 1853 that the Louvre had just acquired a silver bowl from Péretié, now AO 20134. R. S. Merrillees stresses that the bowl's Idalion provenance is unconfirmed⁵. In 1854 he gave the Louvre three Cypriot limestone heads, one of them colossal, carried to Paris by Félicien de Saulcy; their present whereabouts are not known¹. In 1863 he bought a gold stater of Pnytagoras of Salamis, which he reported to William Waddington, who published it¹.

Cesnola, who excavated in Cyprus from 1866, also dealt with him. He wrote that Péretié, the French consul and Cesare Mattei continued Melchior de Vogüé's digging at Dali on a small scale¹⁰. According to Cassimatis, Cesnola courted Péretié as a seller to the Louvre and asked him to come to Cyprus, which he declined to do. De Ridder saw two Cesnola vases with painted syllabic inscriptions in Péretié's Beirut collection in November 1868, and they reached Louis de Clercq in 1872; they have not been traced¹. In February 1870 Colonna-Ceccaldi, answering an offer relayed by Froehner, referred to "mon associé M. Péretié"⁴.

Vogüé and de Clercq

Péretié met Vogüé in 1854, and their long correspondence is the best record of his activity¹. In 1855 the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar was found at Sidon; Péretié wrote that it lay in the part of the necropolis that belonged to him, and Luynes paid his expenses and gave it to the Louvre¹.

Louis de Clercq met him in 1859 and later called him his "zélé collaborateur" and "pourvoyeur attitré"⁷. The Cypriot objects Péretié gathered are described as the nucleus of the de Clercq collection⁸. De Clercq claimed that Péretié excavated on his instructions, a claim Cassimatis rejects¹.

Péretié died at Beirut in April 1882. His son-in-law Edmond de Perthuis then drew up lists of antiquities bought for de Clercq between October 1882 and October 1883, with a fifth list of objects of Péretié's collection still at Beirut⁷.