Through the lens of Henry Viollet: an undisclosed photographic and paper archive on Islamic monuments (1904-1913)

A pioneer in the study of Islamic architecture, Henry Viollet (1880-1955) travelled from Egypt to Central Asia between 1904 and 1913. From his missions, the French architect and archaeologist brought back more than 4,500 written and photographic documents, today kept at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. These archives document Viollet’s excavations at Samarra and his surveys of Islamic monuments, particularly in Iraq and Iran. In 2021-2022 a scientific project funded by the GIS CollEx-Persée and co-partnered with BULAC and CeRMI has been set up to study part of the iconographic materials stored in these archives (EpiPOM project). In the frame of this project, an international conference was organized in Paris on 23 June 2022 to bring together a network of researchers in the arts of Islam into a collaborative study of this partly undisclosed archival material.