Philipp Dethier

The Ottoman antiquities law that the British left in force in Cyprus was, in Salomon Reinach's words, "l'ancienne loi turque rédigée par Déthier"⁴. Philipp Dethier, a German scholar, had been appointed Director of the Imperial Museum in Constantinople when Ahmed Vefik Pasha re-established the post, and in March 1875 he obtained imperial permission to install the collection in the Tchinli Mosque¹. Stanley-Price, following Reinach, dates the law to 1874¹. Reinach gives its terms in Cyprus: one third of finds on private land and two thirds of finds on public land went to the government⁴.

His one recorded dealing in Cyprus itself comes from a letter by Luigi Palma di Cesnola, printed in Life and Deeds. Cesnola wrote that after his return from America in 1873 he had agreed with the American minister to give a large part of his duplicates to the Constantinople museum, and that the Porte then sent "the elderly Mr. Dethier" to Larnaca with an official letter ordering a separation of the antiquities. By Cesnola's account he threw Dethier out, then let him choose after apologies from Dethier and the Governor, and Dethier took 88 boxes. The minister, Mr. Boker, confiscated them at Constantinople and returned them only on condition of an official letter of thanks to Cesnola and a renewal of his firman, which was never renewed². This is Cesnola's version alone. His 1878 book mentions Dethier once more, as the man "who has charge of that lumber-room styled the Imperial Museum", when the two men and the American minister searched the museum for two cases of antiquities Cesnola had sent as a gift and did not find them³.

Dethier published Epigraphik von Byzantion with Mordtmann in 1864⁴ and a study of a colossal Cypriot statue in La Turquie in 1874⁵. Reinach records that objects were stolen in the last year of his administration⁴. He died in 1880; Osman Hamdi Bey succeeded him and asked Reinach to catalogue the collection, and Dethier's Études archéologiques appeared in 1881^1,5.