La naissance de la Société belge d’Études orientales : notes à propos d’une lettre de Louis de La Vallée Poussin à Franz Cumont

This historiographic article aiming to contribute to the history of Oriental scholarship in Belgium deals with the birth of the Belgian Society of Oriental Studies (1921-), on the basis of an annotated edition of a letter dated December 1920 by the Indologist Louis de La Vallée Poussin (1869-1938) to the philologist and historian of religions Franz Cumont (1868-1947), in which the former proposes to the latter to become the president of the society of Oriental studies he is about to start. Cumont, who was then living in Roma (where his archives now lay in the Academia Belgica) declined the pr... Mehr ...