Edith Porada

Edith Porada sorted the cylinder seals of Late Bronze Age Cyprus into groups. Her 1948 article in the American Journal of Archaeology set out the groups, and the excavation reports of the 1950s assign newly found seals to "Miss Porada's group"^9,10,20. She was born in Vienna on 22 August 1912, took her doctorate there in 1935 and went to the United States in 1937. She worked at the Metropolitan Museum and Queens College, became associate professor at Columbia in 1958, full professor in 1963 and Arthur Lehman Professor in 1974, and was for many years curator of seals at the Pierpont Morgan Library¹.

She wrote the seals appendix of Porphyrios Dikaios's Enkomi (1971, pp. 783-810) and the glyptics appendix of Jack L. Benson's Bamboula at Kourion (1972), where she treated nine seals that John Franklin Daniel had asked her to include in her 1948 study^13,21. She also wrote on three seals from the Kaloriziki cemetery (1973) and on the seals from Palaepaphos-Skales for Vassos Karageorghis (1983), placing the cylinder from Tomb 71 in the First Group of the Elaborate Style, in the late 15th century BC^14,15.

In 1970 she and Sarandis Symeonoglou opened the Columbia University Expedition to Phlamoudhi, digging on Vounari from 10 August to 6 September³. In the Chronique entries for 1971 and 1972 she is at the head of the expedition and Symeonoglou is field director; Robert Merrillees was on the team^4,5,19. The work at Vounari and Melissa continued to 1973 and stopped with the war of 1974. Notes, photographs and most of the pottery went to Columbia and the rest to the Cyprus Museum². Porada died in 1994 with most of the Phlamoudhi material unpublished and the export permits had expired. Joanna S. Smith, who came to Columbia in 2000, was asked to publish it and to return the finds to Cyprus². The last fascicle of the British Museum cylinder-seal catalogue, by Dominique Collon and the late Edith Porada, appeared in 2016¹⁸.