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.