Jacqueline Karageorghis

From 1959 to 1989 each year's report on excavations and discoveries in Cyprus reached readers of the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique in French because Jacqueline Karageorghis translated it. Vassos Karageorghis wrote the English text, and she supplied the technical vocabulary, with help from Olivier Masson on the syllabic inscriptions; the series had been agreed in 1958 between him and Georges Daux of the French School at Athens¹. It covered foreign missions, museum acquisitions and private collections⁵.

She came to Cyprus in April 1953 as Vassos Karageorghis's wife, against the objection of her Lyon professor Charles Dugas, who thought Cypriot pottery "provincial and ugly". She also studied ancient history under Jean Pouilloux. In Nicosia she taught French, and she could not work as an archaeologist inside the Department of Antiquities¹. In 1962 she gave Terence Mitford a photograph and information on a syllabic inscription found on the Kourion acropolis, and they published it together in 1964³. Karageorghis writes that he first glimpsed Pouilloux in 1959 waiting for her outside a lecture; at the end of the 1963 Paris congress boat trip he proposed that Lyon excavate at Salamis, and the first Lyon mission began there in 1965¹. Pouilloux had pressed her into a thesis. Her documentation for it was lost in 1974 and found at a British military airfield, and the thesis became La Grande Déesse de Chypre et son culte (1977)².

She wrote the appendix on ancient sources for Paphos: History and Archaeology (1984)⁴, co-edited with Masson the proceedings of the 1986 Larnaca conference on the history of language in Cyprus¹³, and published Kypris, the Aphrodite of Cyprus in 2005¹². The University of Cyprus gave her an honorary doctorate in September 2015¹. She died in 2018⁹.