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Concept
Émile Amélineau
Summary
Émile Amélineau (1850 – 12 January 1915 at Châteaudun) was a French Coptologist, archaeologist and Egyptologist. His scholarly reputation was established as an editor of previously unpublished Coptic texts. But his reputation was destroyed by his work as a digger at Abydos, after Flinders Petrie re-excavated the site and showed how much destruction Amélineau had wrought.
Amélineau began his career by studying theology and was ordained as a priest prior to 1878. Between 1878 and 1883 he studied Egyptology and Coptic at Paris under the direction of Gaston Maspero and Eugène Grébaut. In 1883 he was a member of the French archaeological mission at Cairo, and renounced his orders. In 1887 he submitted his thesis, on Egyptian gnosticism. Thereafter he held a number of academic posts in France.
Amélineau published great quantities of Coptic literature. He was perhaps the greatest Coptic scholar of his generation.
He undertook an ambitious project to edit the literary remains of Shenoute, the founder of Coptic monasticism. He first published a collection of Coptic and Arabic texts, all more or less related to this subject (1888–95), and then a corpus of Shenoute's own works (1907–14). Work on the latter was interrupted by his death. Stephen Emmel has said that his publication of these texts was "too full of errors to be relied on for serious purposes", but that no one else has undertaken the task.
Amélineau also excavated in Egypt, at a period when archaeology had yet to become a scientific subject distinguishable from tomb raiding or treasure hunting. Much of his work was on the Early Dynastic period of Ancient Egypt. In 1895 he discovered a stele inscribed with the name of pharaoh Djet. This object is now on display at the Louvre. He was the first archaeologist to excavate the tombs of the First Dynasty pharaohs of Ancient Egypt at the Umm el-Qa'ab section of Abydos, his findings outlined in several volumes of material published in the early years of the 20th century.
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