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Biography
Georges Aaron Bénédite (10 August 1857 –26 March 1926) was a French Egyptologist and curator at the Louvre.
He was born at Nîmes, the son of Samuel Bénédite and Isabelle Bénédite born Lisbonne, whose second husband George Lafenestre (1837–1919), was a noted poet, art critic and curator of the Louvre, who helped raise the young George Aaron. George Aaron himself became a curator at the Louvre in the Department of Egyptology in 1907.
Bénédite is noted for his discovery of the tomb of Akhethetep at Saqqara on March 28, 1903. The chapel of Akhethotep, now in the Louvre was brought back by Bénédite as was customary for egyptologists at the time. Bénédite excavated several tombs in the Valley of the Kings, such as KV41 in 1900. He is one of the first to propose the existence of theater in ancient Egypt
Bénédite is also known for his buying for the Louvre the Gebel el-Arak Knife from private antique dealer M. Nahman in Cairo in February 1914. Bénédite immediately recognized the extrodinary state of preservation of the artefact as well as his archaic datation. On March the 16th, 1914, he writes to Charles Boreux, then head of the département des Antiquités égyptiennes of the Louvre about the knife an unsuspecting antique dealer presented him:
Bénédite died in Luxor, Egypt, shortly after visiting the tomb of Tutankhamun, further adding to the legend of the curse of the pharaoh. His body was brought back to France and was buried in the family vault in the cemetery of Bourg-la-Reine in the Hauts-de-Seine.
Publications
- Égypte, Paris, Hachette, 1900, in three volumes, comprises 7 maps, 104 plans, 54 illustrations and 22 synoptic tables.