Pierre Lacau

In 1902 Pierre Lacau published "Une inscription phénicienne de Chypre" in the second volume of the Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale, reading the text of a cippus from a photograph without having seen the stone². Paul-Louis Couchoud, on a mission for the University of Paris, had collected antiquities in Cyprus, among them the cippus, bought from a peasant who said he had just found it at Paleo-Castro, on the east shore of the Gulf of Larnaca. Passing through Cairo, Couchoud gave Lacau the photograph and asked him to make the inscription known. Lacau called his study provisional, since the object itself was destined for the Louvre. He thought the cippus unlikely to have been moved, noted that to his knowledge the locality had not yielded such a find before, and illustrated a head of Bes found with it².

Lacau was born at Brie-Comte-Robert on 25 November 1873³. He became director of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale in Cairo in 1912, directed the Egyptian Antiquities Service from 1914 to 1936, and held the chair of Egyptology at the Collège de France from 1938 to 1947⁴. He died in Paris on 26 March 1963³.