Giovanni Dattari. Un numismatico italiano al Cairo

An exhaustive study of the life and work of the Italian numismatist Giovanni Dattari, who lived in Cairo between the last years of the 19th century and 1923, points out that he has been not only a collector of coins and antiquities, but also an expert scholar. He put together the most extensive collection of Alexandrian coins and almost monopolized the trade in ancient coins in Egypt during two decades, but also produced a number of high quality works on numismatics. His biggest achievement was without any doubt the catalogue Numi Augg. Alexandrini, published in Cairo in 1901, that remains a standard reference notwithstanding its defects, but he wrote also many articles on Ptolemaic, Alexandrian and Roman coinage. He partly abandoned his numismatic researches in later life to dedicate himself to cataloguing the celebrated collection of Egyptian scarab of King Fouad that seems never to have been published.