Justus Siegismund

Justus Siegismund, a philologist from Leipzig, died in March 1876 after falling into a rock-cut tomb at Amathus, one of those Luigi Palma di Cesnola had excavated^2,3. Boutkowski's Dictionnaire numismatique, quoted by Masson, calls him a native of Leipzig, pupil and friend of Georg Curtius, and gives his dates as 1851 to 1876; the Saxon government chose him for archaeological excursions in Cyprus at its expense¹.

With Wilhelm Deecke he published "Die wichtigsten kyprischen Inschriften umschrieben und erläutert" in Curtius' Studien 6 in 1874⁷. A further "Kyprische Inschriften" came out in 1877, after his death⁵.

Boutkowski says he reached Cyprus in early February 1876 after some months in Athens, and on a first excursion visited Idalion, Nicosia, Kyrenia, Salamis and Famagusta, copying inscriptions; Masson doubts that those he called unpublished were new¹. In March he went with a guide to see the Phoenician tombs at Amathus, meaning to return that evening to Limassol. At Hagios Tychonas he went on alone with a peasant's wife and fell about 40 feet into a tomb; he was dead when found¹. Cesnola, who was away from Amathus at the time, wrote that Siegismund was coming out of one of the tombs when he fell back into it³. Friends raised a monument over his grave in the Limassol cemetery¹.

Deecke used his copies in the corpus of 1883. His two travel notebooks passed from his father to Richard Meister and have since disappeared¹.