Pierre Tallet, born in 1966, is an alumnus of the Ecole normale Superieure and former member of the French institute of Archaeology in Cairo. He is now the chair of Egyptology at the Sorbonne. Tallet served as the President of the French Society of Egyptology from 2009 to 2021, and is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Since 2001, he has directed or co-directed several archaeological projects in Egypt and Sudan, in particular on the Red Sea sea shore where the old pharaonic harbours of Ayn Soukhna and Wadi el-Jarf were successively identified. He still leads an annual archaeological campaign on the latter site, where the most ancient papyri known to date were found between 2013 and 2018.