Adolphe Reinach


Adolphe Joseph Reinach was a French archaeologist and Egyptologist who participated in excavations in Greece and Egypt and published works on the Gauls.
Working in Egypt for the Société française des fouilles archéologiques with Raymond Weill in 1910-1911, he discovered the Coptos Decrees in the temple of Min at Coptos.

Biography

Adolphe Reinach was born on 12 January 1887 in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, the son of the archaeologist Joseph Reinach and his wife Henriette-Clémentine Reinach.
Adolphe did numerous travels around the Mediterranean and consequently studied at the French School at Athens from 1909 until 1911. He participated in excavations in Thasos and then proposed to excavate the site of Qift in Egypt for the :fr:Société française d'archéologie. After securing the necessary funds in 1910, he directed the works in Qift with Raymond Weill and André Martinaud, who documented the excavations with numerous photographs. It is during this time that Adolphe Reinach uncovered the Coptos Decrees dating back to the end of the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period. A number of the artefacts unearthed by Reinach are now housed in the Musée Guimet and Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, both in Lyon.
With the onset of the First World War, Adolphe Reinach was mobilised. A lieutenant of Cuirassiers in the :fr:46e régiment d'infanterie|46e régiment d'infanterie in the French Army, he was killed in Fossé in the Ardennes soon after the beginning of the war, at the end of August 1914. Reinach had married Marguerite Dreyfus, daughter of Mathieu Dreyfus, and had a son, Jean-Pierre Reinach, born after his father's death. Jean-Pierre was killed during the Second World War, at the same age as his father was during the First.

Works