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Four Coptic Textiles from the Louvre Collection 14C Redated after 55 Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2016

Mark van Strydonck  and
Dominique Bénazeth
Mark van Strydonck*
Affiliation:
Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Jubelpark 1, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Dominique Bénazeth
Affiliation:
Musée du Louvre, Département des antiquités égyptiennes, Section copte, F-75058 Paris cédex 1, France
*
Corresponding author. Email: mark.vanstrydonck@kikirpa.be
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Abstract

Dating of Coptic textiles performed in the early days of the radiocarbon dating method was revisited. In 1957–1958, Louvre curator and art historian P du Bourguet had 4 Coptic textiles 14C dated by the Saclay laboratory. The results were rejected, not because of the large standard deviation (>100 yr), but because their ages did not support his chronological framework based on typological comparison. Furthermore, textiles with comparable ages were dated several centuries apart. As a result of this investigation, for many decades art historians rejected 14C as a dating tool for Coptic textiles. Re-examination of the old data and new 14C analyses revealed that mistakes were made, both in the reporting as in the interpretation of the data and that the textiles are much older than presumed.

Type
Articles
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , 2014 , pp. 1 - 5
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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