Jean Yoyotte (1927-2009)
Jean Yoyotte passed away on July 1. He was born in Lyon on August 4, 1927, into a family originally from Martinique. His father was a chemical engineer with a comfortable position at Rhône-Poulenc, which soon led him to move to Paris. So, from 1932, at the age of five, Jean Yoyotte became a Parisian. He remained so until his death. It would be more accurate to say that he became a citizen of the 5th arrondissement and, even more precisely, of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. He studied at the Lycée Henri IV and lived out his days in his apartment on rue Monge. This topography may seem very narrow. It barely masks a career path whose vast horizons were nurtured in the prestigious institutions that reside there.
His studies at Henri IV left him with two precious assets for the rest of his life: an insatiable curiosity and a deep friendship with Serge Sauneron, forged in the discovery, shared at an early age, of the Egypt of the pharaohs. This strong relationship would only come to an end with Serge Sauneron's tragic death in 1976, when, at the age of 49 and head of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, he was at the pinnacle of our studies. The "directed leisure activities" imposed in 1936 by Léon Blum's government had the unexpected consequence of uniting the "Egyptian club" founded by the two friends' art teacher, who had been joined by Gérard Godron, who would end his career as professor of Egyptology at Paul-Valéry University. From the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, our three friends made their way to the École du Louvre and the École pratique des hautes études.
There, Jean Yoyotte followed the lectures of the masters of the time: Jean Sainte Fare Garnot, Jacques-Jean Clère, Michel Malinine, Jacques Vandier, Gustave Lefebvre and Georges Posener, whose disciple he became. After passing his baccalaureate in 1945, he undertook a degree in History and joined the CNRS as an intern in 1948. He was assigned to Pierre Montet's chair at the Collège de France. Two encounters were to shape his entire life: the Collège - which he never really left, even though he regularly crossed the rue Saint-Jacques to join the second pole of his career, the École Pratique des Hautes Études - and Pierre Montet, from whom he inherited Tanis and was one of his successors at the Collège.
He graduated from the École pratique des hautes études (IVe section) in 1951 and obtained a post-graduate diploma in history in 1952, which enabled him to join the Institut français d'archéologie orientale in Cairo as a scientific member in 1953. He remained in Egypt until 1957. It was not an easy time in a country that was questioning the very foundations of its society, but Jean Yoyotte was able to travel the country, often in the company of Bernard Bothmer, with whom he would remain closely associated for the rest of his life. He carefully visited the sites to which he would later devote numerous studies: Heliopolis, Kôm Abou Billou, Saft el-Hennah, Abousir-Banna, Kôm el-Kébir, Samanoud, Mendès, Tell Rozan, Tell Abou Yassin, Horbeit, and so on. He was especially fascinated by the sites in the delta, to which he devoted most of his research. In 1961, this initial confrontation of fieldwork with historical sources gave rise to an article that remains one of his major works, "Les principautés du delta au temps de l'anarchie libyenne" ("The principalities of the delta at the time of Libyan anarchy"). In it, he organized the complex documentation of this period, providing a fresh synthesis that would serve as the basis for later works on the same subject, notably those by Farouk Gomàa and Kenneth A. Kitchen.
The geography of the delta and, more particularly, religious geography were to be the main thread running through the lectures he gave at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1964 onwards, when he took over from the prematurely deceased Jean Sainte-Fare Garnot, who had been his director at the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale for four years. Since his return from Egypt, he had renewed his ties with the Collège, and returned to the Cabinet Champollion library, where he had once been librarian.
Also in 1964, he took charge of the Tanis site, where work had been suspended since 1956. He carried out ten campaigns there until 1984, continuing a long and patient work of inventory and classification, both in the field and in the archives of the Montet mission. He systematically surveyed the site and explored its major sectors: the temple of Khonsu, the Sacred Lake area, the south of the temple of Mut and, of course, the necropolis, brought to light by Pierre Montet's major discoveries during the Second World War.
At the same time, as part of the Centre de documentation d'histoire des religions, he set up and ran the Centre Vladimir Golenischeff, which today remains at the heart of the Montet archives' scientific documentation and will be further enriched by Jean Yoyotte's personal library.
A fine result of this patient reconstruction and ongoing work on the site was the exhibition devoted to the treasures of Tanis, which opened in 1987 in Paris at the Grand Palais, then in Marseille at the Centre de la Vieille Charité, before embarking on an international tour. In 1984, Philippe Brissaud took over the management of this site with its immense potential, as demonstrated once again by this year's discovery of the Sacred Lake of Mut.
Jean Yoyotte was elected professor at the Collège on June 30, 1991. From 1992 to 1997, when he retired, his lectures were mainly devoted to late Egypt, with an increasing focus on the Greek period and the role played by the great cities of the delta, in particular Naucratis and, in recent years, Thônis-Héracleion. His interest in the Greek presence dates back to his years in Egypt, during which he assisted Père du Bourguet with the epigraphic inventory of Deir el-Medîna and Abydos. At that time, he had also begun to record Carian and Cypriot graffiti. The Greek dossier was to occupy him all his life, for a long time with the scientific complicity of Olivier Masson, then, in recent years, in association with André Bernand.
For a quarter of a century at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, then during his six years at the Collège, Jean Yoyotte gave a varied and dense lecture, contributing to the formation, generation after generation, of French and international Egyptology. For my generation, his lectures were, along with those of Jean Leclant, Georges Posener, Jacques-Jean Clère and Paul Barguet, the primary source of learning. He taught Egyptian grammar as well as the various facets of religion, from geography to specific priesthoods and funerary literature; we followed the virtuosity of the Master who never hesitated to tackle unpublished or little-known texts with us.
His scholarly work reflects this ever-awakening curiosity. A historian first and foremost, he is also a geographer and philologist. His studies cover toponymy, royalty, the prosopography of individuals, anthroponymy, institutions, the economy, society, the pantheon and religious concepts. Each study is the occasion for a rich and dense perspective. This is not the place to enumerate his varied and abundant scientific output. Suffice it to say that even the smallest of the studies he has devoted to, even if they seemed like minor details before he took an interest in them, are and will remain indispensable to the researcher.
The general public knows him mainly through his collective works. The most famous is undoubtedly the Dictionnaire de la Civilisation égyptienne, in which he is associated with Georges Posener and Serge Sauneron. Published in 1959, the work is constantly being reprinted, and a new, revised edition is currently in progress. He also contributed three essays on Egyptian history, art and mentality to the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. In 1968, he published Les Trésors des Pharaons, and more recently, in 2005, with Pascal Vernus, a Bestiaire des pharaons.
As luck would have it, last week saw the publication of the major volume Le Palais de Darius à Suse, edited by Jean Perrot. It contains a contribution by Jean Yoyotte: the definitive publication of the Egyptian statue of Darius, discovered in 1973, which occupies chapter VIII. Here we find not only the erudition and precision, but also the historian's vision and fine intelligence of the great scholar who has left us.
Nicolas Grimal
References
Bibliography
Nicolas Grimal, "Jean Yoyotte (1927-2009)", La lettre du Collège de France, 28 | 2010, 43-44.
Electronic
Nicolas Grimal, "Jean Yoyotte (1927-2009)", La lettre du Collège de France [Online], 28 | avril 2010, Online since 23 May 2011, connection on 21 May 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lettre-cdf/1104; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lettre-cdf.1104
