Daressy : a scholar, an archive. Exhibition at the Collège de France from March 6

"Georges Daressy was not only a key figure in French Egyptology in Egypt, when research and conservation of its pharaonic heritage began to become systematic. He also made a significant contribution to the development of the Institut d'égyptologie at the Collège de France, where the lectures given by Eugène Grébaut - then Gaston Maspero's deputy - played an essential role in his training. After his death in 1938, the Collège received from his widow his entire library, with dozens of titles and hundreds of offprints, to complement the collections of its "Bibliothèque Champollion". But the bequest did not stop there. It also included his archives, which bring together numerous files compiled during his thirty-six years of work in Egypt and the fifteen years of his retirement in the Paris region.

Paying tribute to Georges Daressy by dedicating an exhibition to him in the very place where he learned his trade is not only well-deserved. It's an indispensable task, if only to underline the interest of the documentation he left behind, independently of the hundreds of publications he authored. His archives include, among other treasures, notes on various unpublished monuments, which have helped to bring them out of oblivion, and thus to measure their importance. They also include works on geography, his favourite field of research, the most accomplished of which is his Atlas archéologique de l'Égypte, an unpublished document published by our Chair of The Civilization of Pharaonic Egypt in 2002.

At a time when Egyptology is becoming truly aware of the value of the testimonies left by its most ancient representatives, we can appreciate the timeliness of an exhibition that aims, in particular, to highlight all the benefits that can be drawn from the exploitation of an archive such as Georges Daressy's."