Paris Colloquium remembers archaeologist and numismatist Henri Seyrig

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September 26, 2013 – On October 10 and 11, 2013 a colloquium in honour of French archaeologist and numismatist Henri Seyrig will be held in Paris. Henri Seyrig was not only an accomplished archaeologist trained at Paris, Oxford and Athens but also a man firmly rooted in his own time, the twentieth century. During WW I he was decorated at Verdun and fought at Saloniki where he got in touch with Antiquity.
After his studies he became secretary general of the École française d’Athènes in 1928 and only one year later head of the Antiquity service of Syria and Lebanon in Beirut, then French protectorate. He was very active in formulating a legal framework regarding property issues of archaeological findings in the Orient and export and digging licenses, he brought forward the archaeological diggings at famous sites like Baalbek and, after the war, he became eventually director of the French Institute of the Middle East until 1967.
He was a political man, too, fighting in the Résistance and later militating against colonialism.
Besides all this he also collected antiquities, coins and Byzantine lead seals in particular, which he bequeathed to the Cabinet des Médailles.

The colloquium will take place in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Thursday) and in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Friday). The papers will approach Henri Seyrig from his various aspects as political man, archaeologist, collector, and much more.
All information on the colloquium and a comprehensive list of the papers is available online.