Jean Yoyotte


Jean Yoyotte was a French Egyptologist, Professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France and director of research at the École pratique des hautes études.

Biography

Born in 1927 at Lyon, he attended the Lycée Henri-IV where he befriended Serge Sauneron who later became director of the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale. Later he attended a course at the École du Louvre under the supervision of Jacques Vandier, and later studied at the EPHE. Around 1949, he conducted researches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and in the interval 1952–56 he was in Cairo at the IFAO. In 1964 he became director of research for ancient Egyptian religion at the EPHE, where he was a student a few decades earlier.
From 1965–85 he was director of the French excavations at Tanis in the eastern Nile Delta; he organized a major exhibition of the results of these excavations in 1987 at the Grand Palais in Paris. In 1992 he was appointed to the chair of Egyptology at the Collège de France, a position which he held until 2000.

Death

Jean Yoyotte died in Paris on 1 July 2009, aged 81.

Significant works