Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 6 December 2025 bourguet, pierre du, S.J. (1910–1988), coptologist, egyptologist,
archaeologist, and art historian
Dominique Bénazeth Keywords: Bourguet S.J., Pierre du; Bawit (Egypt); Byzantine art; Catholic Institute of Paris; Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia; Coptic art; Coptic civilization; Coptic Encyclopedia; Coptic textiles; Drioton, Etienne, 1889–1961; Early Christian art; École du Louvre; Egyptology; International Association for Coptic Studies; Jamʻīyat al-Āthār al-Qibṭīyah (Egypt); Louvre Museum; Museum curators; Radiocarbon dating; Torp, Hjalmar, 1924–2023; Tud.
pierre du bourguet, S.J. (born Pierre Marie d’Audibert Caille du Bourguet in Ajaccio, France, on 21 January 1910) was a Coptologist, Egyptologist, and specialist in early Christian and Byzantine art. He died on 30 December 1988. A select list of Pierre du Bourguet’s numerous publications is a part of the bibliography at the end of this entry.
At age 17, he joined the Society of Jesus and became a Catholic priest at age 33. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Sorbonne in Paris (1929–1931) and studied scholastic and modern philosophy in Jersey (1931–1934). After completing his military service (1935–1936), he served as a soldier during World War II (1939–1940). He then studied theology and Egyptology in Lyon (1940–1944), followed by further study in Egyptology in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1944–1946) and in Oxford at Queen’s College (1947–1948). He also attended Fordham University in New York. Bourguet Figure 1. Pierre du Bourguet, S.J.
was a scientific member of the Institut français Photo courtesy Dominique d’archéologie orientale (ifao) in Cairo (1953–1957).
Bénazeth.
He was also a member of the Institut d’Égypte and he followed Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt in the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of nubia, under unesco leadership (Desroches-Noblecourt 1989: 15). He wrote many articles on the subject of Nubian monuments (Bénazeth and Bovot 1992: 25–26). A disciple of Canon étienne drioton (1889–1961), who was a professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris and a curator at the louvre museum, Bourguet published with him Les Pharaons à la conquête de l’art (1965), for which they received the Broquette-Gonin Prize from the Académie Française, posthumously for Drioton. Bourguet wrote five obituaries for his mentor (Bénazeth and Bovot 1992: 7, 19–20).
His teaching career commenced at Jesuit colleges in Dole (France), Beirut, and Cairo. In Cairo, Bourguet was also a member and visiting professor at the institute of coptic studies. In Paris, he taught Middle Egyptian, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic at the Catholic Institute, where he was promoted to president of the School of Oriental Languages, and he published two grammars (Rutschowscaya 1991a; Bénazeth and Bovot 1992: 21). At the École du Louvre and the Rachel Boyer Foundation at the same school, Bourguet gave lectures on early Christian and Byzantine art and Egyptian archaeology.
© Claremont Graduate University 1 Dominique Bénazeth: Bourguet, Pierre du (1910–1988) 6 December 2025 Figure 2. Pierre du Bourguet S.J. celebrating Mass in the temple in Tōd during the Louvre’s excavations. Photo by Jean-Luc Bovot, 1980.
As a curator and Curator-in-Chief at the Louvre Museum from 1957 to 1978, Bourguet was responsible for the Coptic section of the Egyptian Antiquities Department (Rutschowscaya 1992: 1). During this period, he studied the immense textile collection of Pierre Puy-Haubert, an Alexandrian doctor (Bénazeth 2013: 90–91; Bénazeth 2015: 11; Bénazeth 2017a) and expanded his research on the dating of Coptic textiles. Bourguet requested the partial acquisition of Puy-Haubert’s collection, and no fewer than 712 of its Coptic textiles entered the Louvre in 1960. These textiles were included in an extensive catalogue at the Louvre which he was in the process of compiling (Bourguet 1964a), but unfortunately, he was unable to complete the second volume. Perhaps less successfully, he also made a few acquisitions of carved stones, at a time when major museums were buying sculptures from antique dealers for their Coptic collections.
In the same year, 1964, Bourguet organized the major exhibition L’art copte in Paris, which had previously been shown in Essen, Zurich, and Vienna, under the title Koptische Kunst. Christentum am Nil (Bourguet 1964b).
In 1969, the Section des antiquités chrétiennes, created in 1954 under the direction of Étienne Coche de la Ferté, was dismantled and its Coptic objects, which had been given new inventory numbers, were returned to the Louvre’s Egyptian department (Bénazeth 2013: 89; Bénazeth 2015: 13–14). Bourguet designed three new rooms to display Roman and Coptic objects. They were inaugurated in 1973 by André Malraux, French Minister of Culture. In collaboration with the Norwegian art historian Hjalmar Torp, Bourguet produced a splendid reconstruction of a monastic church with sculptures from bawiṭ. The famous icon of Christ with Apa Mena was the masterpiece of the presentation, which also featured many beautiful Coptic textiles (Bourguet 1975b; Rutschowscaya 1991b; Meurice 2020: 133–134).
Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 2 Dominique Bénazeth: Bourguet, Pierre du (1910–1988) 6 December 2025 Much later, in 1980, Bourguet took part in the Louvre’s excavations at Tōd (see tud), south of luxor (Bénazeth 2013: fig. 20). He celebrated Mass in the temple (Desroches-Noblecourt 1989: 16), as he had done before in a pharaonic tomb, during his mission to collect Theban graffiti (Bourguet 1975a: 27–29) (see Fig. 2).
Bourguet’s extensive knowledge of Coptic Egypt has been recognized in many fields. With jean simon and Hans Quecke, he edited the annual Coptic bibliography in Orientalia (1949–1976). He was a correspondent member of the Société d’archéologie copte and named an Honorary President of the International Association for Coptic Studies in 1976. As one of the editors of The Coptic Encyclopedia in the areas of art and archaeology, Bourguet enriched the Encyclopedia (Gabra 2024: 3) with many significant entries (mentioned in general terms in Bénazeth and Bovot 1992: 19; details infra), but he died before the Encyclopedia’s publication in 1991. Fortunately, his entries have been digitized and can be consulted in the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia. One of them, museums, coptic collections in, is very important and unique in the literature. It provides a list of places where Coptic antiquities are kept. To compile it, Bourguet sent a list of questions to 192 museums, 53 universities, and a few private collections in 212 cities in 21 countries, asking for the category and number of items, and their state of preservation. Three public collections are referred to as separate entries in the Encyclopedia: the coptic museum in Cairo (Munir Basta), the Bode Museum in Berlin (Arne Effenberger; see state museum of berlin), and the Louvre Museum (Marie-Hélène Rutschowscaya).
Another of Bourguet’s entries, art, historiography of coptic, reveals the role he played in the study of Coptic civilization and its heritage, in which he raises the question of dating. His comparative method, applied to large collections, made it possible to establish a well-marked Coptic chronology, and he demonstrated that the production of Coptic textiles continued until the thirteenth century AD. Bourguet was also a pioneer in the field of radiocarbon textile analysis, taking samples from his own collection in 1957 and 1958 (van Strydonck and Bénazeth 2014). This use of radiocarbon dating to test Coptic textiles has only been recognized and implemented since the beginning of the twentieth century (Bénazeth 2017b).
From this personal collection, he donated two Ptolemaic funerary paintings from Alexandria to the Louvre (Ville 1969) and probably the Ethiopian triptych which was in the 1964 exhibition, labeled as private collection in the catalogue (p. 280, no 351) and from that time kept in the museum. Some of his privately held textiles also entered the museum after his death (museum inventory numbers E 32319–E 32370); others were sold (Catalogue 2013: 21).