René Dussaud

René Dussaud, curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre from 1928 to 1936, urged French scholars to work in Cyprus, Claude Schaeffer first among them². He was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 24 December 1868 and died there on 17 March 1958⁷. He trained as an engineer at the École Centrale before turning to the Near East. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia, he was enthused by Evans's discoveries on Crete, visited the island and wrote Les civilisations préhelléniques, whose second edition appeared in 1914^4,6.

The Oxford Encyclopedia says the identification of Enkomi with Alashiya was proposed by Dussaud and by Claude Schaeffer; Merrillees credits Dussaud with naming Enkomi Alashiya without epigraphic evidence^1,4. After the war, Dussaud was consulted by Jean Bérard over Nea Paphos in 1951, and in 1953 he told Bérard that the Commission des Fouilles would meet only in March and that the mission would probably be renewed³.

His private archaeological collection is now in the Musée cantonal d'archéologie et d'histoire in Lausanne. It includes Cypriot Bronze and Iron Age objects, among them a Black Slip juglet of Proto Base-ring shape and six limestone heads described as Cypriote and said to come from Amrit; how he acquired them is not recorded¹.