Quick Facts
Biography
Jean Yoyotte (August 4, 1927 – July 1, 2009) was a French Egyptologist, Professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France and director of research at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE).
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 (IFAO). Later he attended a course at the École du Louvre under the supervision of Jacques Vandier, and then he became a student at the EPHE as a pupil of Georges Posener.
Around 1949 Yoyotte conducted researches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and in the interval 1952-1956 he was in Cairo at the IFAO. In 1964 he became director of research for ancient Egyptian religion at the EPHE where he was student few decades earlier, and between 1965 and 1985 he was director of the French excavations at Tanis in the eastern Nile Delta; a major exhibition of the results of these excavations was organized by him 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.
He died in Paris in July 1, 2009.
Significant works
- With Georges Posener and Serge Sauneron: Dictionnaire de la civilisation égyptienne, 1959
- With Serge Sauneron: La naissance du monde selon l'Égypte ancienne, In La Naissance du Monde, Paris 1959
- Les trésors des pharaons, 1968
- Tanis l'or des pharaons, 1987
- With Pascal Vernus: Dictionnaire des pharaons, 1992
- With Pascal Vernus: Bestiaire des Pharaons, 2001