Arthur Bernard Cook

Arthur Bernard Cook owned a red-ware hydria from Kourion that he said had been in the Pierides collection, and printed it in Zeus⁵. Born in Hampstead in 1868, he studied at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge, taught at Bedford College from 1892, and became Fellow of Queens' College in 1900, Reader in Classical Archaeology in 1907 and Laurence Professor in 1931². On 27 February 1897 he showed the Hellenic Society an impression of an early gold signet-ring in the British Museum, from the recent excavations in Cyprus, on which a man with a wolf's head and tail stabs a lion, and suggested that it pointed to a primitive wolf-cult⁶.

His Cypriot pieces appear as illustrations in Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. In the first volume he figured a Cyprus coin from his own collection³. The second carries bronze coins of Vespasian and Trajan showing the temple at Paphos, and a small gold ring engraved with the Paphian sanctuary⁴. The third volume has two coins of Drusus with the Paphian cone⁵ and a fluted red-ware hydria from Kourion, bottomless and pierced beneath the handles, which Cook described as "formerly in the Pierides collection and now in mine"⁵. He does not say which Pierides owned it or how it reached him.

In 1934 he bought a Parian marble head of Aphrodite at the Harland-Peck sale at Sotheby's (lot 48), which is now at Queens' College⁷. In 1948 the Otago Museum in Dunedin acquired his collection of Greek vases and sculpture, with a gift made in memory of Willi Fels⁹. Where the Cypriot hydria, coins and ring went is not recorded. He died in Cambridge on 26 April 1952².