George Smith

George Smith, of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, gave, with Robert Hamilton Lang, the first communications on reading the Cypriot syllabary. When Lang found the Phoenician and Cypriot bilingual at Dali on 30 July 1869, Samuel Birch handed it to Smith for study and publication, and Smith called it among the most important objects found in Cyprus¹. On 7 November 1871 he and Lang gave the first of these communications at the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London². Smith is credited with discovering the word for "king" in the Cypriot signs and with reading the proper names^3,4.

Luigi Palma di Cesnola cited Smith's History of Assyria for the Esarhaddon prism, which lists Cypriot kings, and noted that Smith could read only three letters of the king of Soli's name⁵. Cesnola also asked Birch whether Smith would write the chapter on inscriptions for his book, for payment¹.

In March 1876 the British Museum trustees asked Smith to go to Cyprus to buy Cesnola's second collection, for which Cesnola asked 15,000 pounds. Austen Henry Layard wrote that he was glad Smith "has come to Cyprus", but Marangou says that plague held Smith up at Aleppo, and that account records no purchase by the Museum¹. His dates of birth and death are not recorded; Lang called him "the late Mr. George Smith" in 1878³.