Josette Elayi-Escaich (; born 29 March 1943) is a French antiquity historian, Phoenician and Near-Eastern history specialist, and honorary scholar at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Elayi authored numerous archaeology and history works, and literary novels. She is well known to the French public through her novels and for her calls for reform and activism against the CNRS research policy bias. In 2007 Elayi was decorated Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French state.
Early life and education
Josette Elayi née Escaich was born on 29 March 1943 in Les Bordes-sur-Lez, a small former commune now merged into Bordes-Uchentein in the Couserans (part of the Ariège department) in France's Pyrenees mountains. She studied in the nearby town of Saint-Girons. At the Saint-Girons high school, Elayi had an affinity for science and literature, but a skiing accident caused her to fall behind in science. Elayi recounts that "the literary course was much more rewarding than the sciences at the time". Elayi's parents wanted her to become a teacher, but after her baccalaureate, she went to Toulouse to study classical literature. Elayi is a holder of a Doctorat ès Lettres, the highest doctoral degree in France, and multiple other degrees in oriental languages from Lyon, Paris and Nancy universities.
Work, research and academia
Elayi taught literature in Emilie de Rodat school in Toulouse between 1966 and 1968 before moving on to Notre-Dame school in Lyon where she taught for the next four years. In 1973, Elayi obtained a teaching position in the Lebanese University's faculty of letters in Beirut. Elayi's interest for the history of the Phoenicians was stirred during her short stay in Beirut. When the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Elayi moved to Baghdad where she taught French literature at the Al-Mustansiriya University until 1978. Elayi settled in Paris in 1980, she taught in the Lycée Charlemagne before joining the CNRS as a researcher in ancient history in 1982.
Elayi is versed in fifteen modern and extinct languages. Elayi developed a multidisciplinary historiography method that combines epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology, economics and sociology; she applied this methodology in her works on the history of the Phoenicians. She writes regularly in journals and has received two prizes from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and a prize from the French Numismatic Society ().
Phoenician and Near-Eastern history studies
In 1982, when she was recruited by the CNRS as a senior researcher, Elayi found that her field of research, the history of ancient Phoenicia, was not included in university curricula; it was confined to the Orientalism department which existed until 1991. Phoenician studies were then consigned to the department of Antiquity studies. The CNRS allowed Elayi full-time research and freedom to choose her subjects without teaching-hours constraints. In 1988 her relationship with the CNRS took a negative turn; faced with the lack of support of the committee, Elayi started her own research group, the Association for the research on Syria-Palestine in the Persian Period (ASPEP). ASPEP was embraced and supported by an international network of researchers and obtained public and private funding. Elayi also launched and directs a specialized international journal the Transeuphratène, and wrote a number of historical monographs about Phoenicia and the Ancient Near East. Elayi has also organized more than thirty international and regional meetings. Her scientific program is aimed to develop the little-explored field of Phoenician history using multidisciplinary tools.