Michel Tardieu

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Michel Tardieu (born 10 April 1938) is a French scholar working on religious currents in Late Antiquity and in the Near and Far East.

He was born in Mareuil, Dordogne and educated in a petit séminaire and with the Dominicans in Toulouse before becoming a researcher in state higher education. Work in Iraq and neighbouring countries led to the acquisition of a number of Late Antique Near Eastern languages, extending to extensive familiarity also with Persian and Chinese.

Tardieu was appointed to the École pratique des hautes études Vth section (where he succeeded Pierre Hadot) and subsequently to the Collège de France (1991).

He has worked mainly on Manichaeism and Gnosticism, on currents related to these in Zoroastrianism. Tardieu has published on Nag Hammadi and other major 20th-century discoveries of texts in Egypt and the wider Near East.

A theory of Tardieu's, which has remained far from securing unanimous adhesion, developed in his work, Les paysages reliques (1990), concerns a hypothetical removal by Simplicius of Cilicia and other Athenian Neoplatonic writers after the closure of the Schools by Justinian (529) to Harran (or Carrhae) in Mesopotamia.