PARIS (AFP).- French archaeologist Jean-Francois Jarrige, who headed the Musee Guimet in Paris for 22 years, has died aged 74 following a long illness, the prestigious museum of Asian arts said Saturday.

Born in the southwestern pilgrimage city of Lourdes on August 5, 1940, Jarrige had a doctorate in oriental archaeology and specialised in the South Asian region.

But his name was most closely associated with the Musee Guimet, which he directed from 1986 to 2008. 

Jarrige was "a man engaged in his time, very sensitive to the sufferings of a region that he knew intimately and whose changes he witnessed with concern," the museum said on its website.

The Guimet Museum (French: Musée national des arts asiatiques or Musée Guimet) is a museum of Asian art located at 6, place d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France. It has one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia.

The museum, which was first located at Lyon in 1879 and was handed over to the state and transferred to Paris in 1885, was founded by Émile Étienne Guimet, an industrialist. Devoted to travel, Guimet was in 1876 commissioned by the minister of public instruction to study the religions of the Far East, and the museum contains many of the fruits of this expedition, including a fine collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain and many objects relating not merely to the religions of the East but also to those of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. One of its wings, the Panthéon Bouddhique, displays religious artworks.



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