Abstract
Although Prisse d’Avennes ended his days in poverty, he left a substantial archive (ultimately preserved by the Bibliothèque Nationale) unlike many other artists and scholars. His son wrote a biography, or rather a hagiography. Prisse is an enigmatic figure in the history of Egyptology and the study of medieval Egypt. His work in many fields lives on in the wonderful illustrated books he published, the finds he brought back to France, and in the key discoveries he made. Yet there are large areas of his life about which nothing is known, and there is so far no modern biography. Another complication is that Prisse was a teller of stories. See his dramatic yarn of the notorious encounter with the unwitting dupe Lepsius on the return journey down the Nile in 1843. This is described by Elisabeth Delange in her essay in the Prisse exhibition catalogue mentioned below as ‘pure invention’.
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