Museums and Communication: The Case of the Louvre Museum at the Covid-19 Age

In the last few decades, modern technology has changed the way people communicate. Owing to being an integral part of society, museums have also been influenced by this phenomenon. This paper aims to provide a general overview of the main communication tools, such as social media and the website. This work's purpose is to highlight how museums can reach a bi-directional communication that allows society to maintain a certain interaction with visitors, even in periods when physical access to the collections is not possible. In order to achieve this goal, the essay deals with the adoption of the main tools of modern communication by the Louvre Museum in Paris. It sets out the usage of Instagram, Facebook and the louvre.fr website and highlights the feedback before and after the lockdown occurred due to the Covid-19 virus.

A New Manuscript of Ninĝišzida’s Journey to the Netherworld

The article presents an edition of a new manuscript of the Old Babylonian Sumerian myth Ninĝišzida’s Journey to the Netherworld from the Louvre museum. The article deals with the complex literary transmission of this composition, known in different versions with much variation. The myth, lamentful in tone, and including Emesal vocabulary and litanies, is compared to the corpus of Emesal prayers, especially the laments over Damu. The myth is also examined in light of an Old Babylonian Akkadian myth on Ninĝišzida’s descent to the netherworld.

Objects as Archives of a Disrupted Past

Objects that were estranged from ex-colonies and are now kept in overseas museums serve as archives of the past, a past largely disrupted by colonialism. For Vanuatu, some objects of cultural heritage that are kept in museums have been recently reconnected to their original places, lineages, and even individual owners. The Lengnangulong sacred stone of Magam Village in North Ambrym is one such object, even though it is only one example in a rich tradition of carved sacred stones. As alienated and contested property in Vanuatu, Lengnangulong is kept and exhibited in the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre Museum in Paris, which is a contested exhibition space in itself. Here, I provide an update on discussions regarding ownership and kopiraet (Indigenous copyright) that have been accelerating in Vanuatu in recent years and on claims for repatriation of this important valuable.

The Role of the Church and Monasticism in the Growth of Legal Coptic

This chapter studies the role of the Church and monasticism in the growth of legal Coptic. To do so, it presents three documentary dossiers that will clarify the major impetus that monasticism exerted with regard to this phenomenon, and the various mechanisms that it followed. The first dossier is a codex of eight wooden tablets that the Louvre Museum acquired in 1992. The tablets contain around twenty-six receipts, some of which are related to taxation, written by different people. These receipts are not written in the same language: twenty are in Greek and six are in Coptic. Ultimately, the codex offers early evidence that Coptic was used in a taxation context under the impetus of a monastic institution. The latter's responsibility for a portion of the collection process explains why Coptic was accepted for this use by the community. The other two dossiers, sharing the same provenance, demonstrates more precisely the role of monasticism in the rise of Coptic and in its creation of a language that could compete with Greek in nonprivate usage.