Antoine Poidebard

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (January 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 6,138 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Antoine Poidebard]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Antoine Poidebard}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Part of a series on the
Society of Jesus
Christogram of the Jesuits
History
Regimini militantis Congregatio de Auxiliis Suppression
Hierarchy
General Congregation Superior General
Spirituality
Spiritual Exercises Ad maiorem Dei gloriam Magis
Works
List of Jesuit educational institutions
Notable Jesuits
Ignatius of Loyola Francis Xavier Peter Faber Pedro Arrupe John Berchmans Francisco Suárez Robert Bellarmine Peter Canisius Edmund Campion Pierre-Jean De Smet Augustin Barruel Aloysius Gonzaga Frederick Copleston Karl Rahner Pope Francis Jesuit saints Jesuit theologians Jesuit philosophers
Catholicism portal
v t e

Antoine Poidebard (Lyon, 12 October 1878 – Beirut, 17 August 1955) was a French landscape archaeologist, Jesuit missionary, and pilot. He pioneered aerial archaeology in the Middle East, flying over Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.^[1][2][3]

Poidebard exploited shadows and differences in vegetation to discover mounts indicating past settlements and Roman roads, photographing these from the air and visiting some of the sites on the ground.^[4]

Biography

Poidebard was a biplane pilot during World War I.^[1]

Poidebard went to Beirut in 1924. He was a pilot in the 39th Aviation Regiment of the French Levant in Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon during which time he conducted an aerial survey of desert regions.^[1][5] He became a priest at Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.^[1]

His work was published in the Syria journal, attached to the Service des antiquités, with 55 photos published from 1927 to 1933. They were also displayed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1930. Poidebard's 1934 book The Trace of Rome in the Syrian Desert (La Trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie) covered his work from 1925 to 1932 and included over 200 photographs. René Mouterde [fr] collaborated on this book, and co-authored another book (Le limes de Chalcis) with him. Five of the photos were also published in L'Illustration in June 1934.^[5]

In the 1934 book, Roidebard documented hundreds of previously undiscovered Roman forts and structures on the empire's Eastern periphery.^[1] He argued that these structures represented a line of defence against incursions from the east.^[1] However, recent scholarship has questioned this thesis, indicating instead that the forts and structures "supported a system of caravan-based interregional trade, communication and military transport."^[1]

While Poidebard dates items to the Roman era, many are actually from the Umayyad dynasty era, such as the Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi. The Lebanon-Syrian Mandate was motivated to highlight Roman legacy over Arab history, Westernizing its history and linking the civilizing of the Romans to that of the Mandate.^[5]

Surveyed items

• Harbaqa Dam
• Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi

Published works

• Poidebard, A. (1927). Les routes anciennes en haute-Djezireh. Syria 8: 55-65.^[4]
• Poidebard, A. (1929). Resultats de sa mission en haute Djezire en automne 1928. Comptes-rendus des Seances de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 72: 91-94.^[4]
• Poidebard, A. (1931). Recherches sur le limes romain (campagne d'automne 1930). Syria 12: 274-280.^[4]
• Poidebard, A. (1934). La trace de Rome dans le desert de Syrie: le limes de Trajan a la conquete arabe: recherches aeriennes (1925-1932), Geuthner, P^[4]

References

This article about a French scientist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e