Greville John Chester

The Ashmolean Museum's Cypriot collection numbered about 200 objects by 1887, and Greville John Chester, a clergyman, author and traveller, was one of the few who supplied it. Ulbrich and Kiely call him "the well-known antiquarian and dealer Rev. Greville Chester (who was a notable benefactor of the Ashmolean collections)"⁶. He was born in 1831 by Tatton-Brown's reckoning, though the title of a 2006 article on him gives 1830^6,7.

The Ashmolean's records credit him with a glass unguentarium presented in 1878 (AN1878.79)¹, a Neolithic stone pestle in 1881 (AN1881.126)² and an alabaster statuette of Aphrodite in 1884 (AN1884.606)³. The records give their regions as Larnaca, Limassol and Larnaca. Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter record that a wheel-made vessel in the Ashmolean (Cyp. 181) was "bought in Cyprus by Greville Chester"⁸. In 1879 Nottingham Castle Museum acquired a number of Cypriot artefacts from him, a "prolific traveller, collector, and dealer"⁶. Tatton-Brown lists him among the correspondents of the British Museum as an "author and traveller" who "gave and sold antiquities" to it, without saying which came from Cyprus⁷.

He died in 1892 and bequeathed to the Ashmolean a Late Cypriot II cylinder seal showing a copper ingot, an antelope and weapons (AN1892.1411)⁴.