Annie Bélis

Annie Bélis (born 1951) is a French archaeologist, philologist, papyrologist and musician. She is a research director at the French CNRS, specialized in music from classical antiquity, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. A former student of the École normale supérieure in Sèvres from 1972 to 1975, Bélis passed the agrégation in ancient literature in 1976. Then, Annie Bélis joined the Fondation Thiers from 1979 à 1982. She finished her PhD during her last year at Fondation Thiers and defended it at Paris-Sorbonne University. The same year, she entered the French School at Athens (1982–1986). In 1986, she published her book Aristoxène de Tarente et Aristote ; le Traité d'Harmonique for which she received the médaille Georges Perrot from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. She got her first position at CNRS as tenured Research Scientist (chargée de recherches) in 1986 and is still with CNRS. She is currently a member of the AOROC laboratory at ENS Ulm. Annie Bélis learned to play the piano with Yvonne Lefébure, the organ and counterpoint with Arsène Bedois, the flute with Serge Kalisky, and the cello with Jeoffrey Walz. Annie Bélis produced numerous papers on the music from classical antiquity. They goes from music theory, as her study on the Harmonics of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, rebuilding music instruments (Greek and Roman Kithara, lyre, ) or musical papyri decryption, as Oxyrhynchus papyrus n°3705, Michigan papyrus n°2958, or Berlin musical papyrus n°6870 where she established that the papyrus contains a Paean to Apollo due written by Mesomedes of Crete. In 2004, she published her work on a papyrus discovered in an unusual way by Laurent Capron, at the time a study engineer at the Institute of Papyrology of the Sorbonne, at the Louvre Museum. She established the papyrus contains a version of Medea written by Carcinos. This version is unusual since here Medea pretends she didn't kill her children unlike in the versions due to Euripides or Seneca.