Olivier Masson

Olivier Masson dug nothing in Cyprus, yet he edited the corpus of the island's syllabic inscriptions, and later reconstructed from archives how consuls and dealers formed and sold the 19th-century collections. He was born on 23 April 1922, studied in Paris, passed the agrégation de grammaire in 1947 and then worked for the CNRS and was at the Fondation Thiers from 1948 to 1951¹. He taught at Nancy from 1951 to 1965, became Directeur d'études in Greek philology and dialectology at the École pratique des hautes études in 1965, and from 1972 to 1990 was professor of Greek at Paris-Nanterre¹.

Reading the inscriptions

His first articles on Cyprus appeared in 1951 and 1952 and dealt with Cypro-Minoan and Eteocypriot¹. Over his career he published more than 400 items, about 240 of them on Cyprus¹. In 1961 came Les inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques, which edited the significant syllabic inscriptions by findspot, the Idalion bronze tablet among them, and which was later reprinted¹. In 1972 he and Maurice Sznycer brought out Recherches sur les Phéniciens à Chypre, a study of the evidence for Phoenicians in Cyprus¹.

He also read new finds for others. Vassos Karageorghis remembered him as a colleague and very close friend who came often to Cyprus and helped with the annual Chronique des fouilles in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, reading inscribed finds¹⁰. Sznycer recalled a two-week tour of the island in 1981, with several days at Kouklia as the guests of Franz Georg Maier¹. In 1984 Masson founded the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes at Nanterre, directed it and wrote much of it; it reached 26 numbers by 1997, and number 27 was a volume of studies in his honour¹.

Consuls, dealers and their letters

Sznycer wrote that Masson loved digging in archives and collections for diplomats, travellers, collectors and adventurers, and that the Colonna-Ceccaldi brothers and the Cesnola brothers were his favourites¹. His articles on Max Ohnefalsch-Richter belong to the same work. In 1985 he reconstructed Ohnefalsch-Richter's visits to Kouklia in 1890 and 1910⁷, and in 1988, with Antoine Hermary, he republished from Ohnefalsch-Richter's Times article of 7 November 1894 the account of his dig at Idalion for the Berlin museum⁶.

In 1990 he published letters from the consul Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi and from Luigi Palma di Cesnola to Wilhelm Froehner, found in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv at Weimar. They show Colonna-Ceccaldi commissioning peasant "excavations" as Cesnola did⁵. He had earlier found Colonna-Ceccaldi's letters to Charles Clermont-Ganneau at the Institut de France⁵.

His 1996 article traced both Cesnola collections⁴. Luigi, the consul at Larnaca, worked through an agent named Besbes and made early offers to New York, to Rollin & Feuardent and to Turin. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola became Luigi's chief digger and partner from late 1873 and was honorary vice-consul at Paphos in 1874. His collection was shown by his patron Edwin Henry Lawrence and sold at Sotheby's in four sales, in 1883, 1884, 1888 and 1892, which brought 975 pounds; the British Museum bought inscribed stones from the 1884 sale, and other Lawrence-Cesnola pieces reached museums such as the Pitt Rivers⁴.

The last essay

In November 1996 Masson was told that he was dying. He kept writing about Luigi Palma di Cesnola until 5 February 1997, and the essay was published in 2001, edited by Emilia Masson, in the colloquium volume dedicated to his memory^2,3. In it he judged Cesnola fairly honest but naive. He considered the story of the Curium "Treasure" an invention, inspired by Schliemann's Priam treasure and driven by money, and he described Ohnefalsch-Richter as an irascible persecutor of Cesnola². In the lawsuit Feuardent v. Cesnola of 1880 to 1884 he believed Cesnola innocent and attributed the younger Feuardent's grievance to losing the commission to sell the collection piecemeal in London, while allowing that some of the accusations about restored statues were not all false². He thought Isaac H. Hall probably did the real work on the Descriptive Atlas².

The same essay lists Cesnola letters he had traced to Hitchcock at Dartmouth, to Samuel Birch at the British Museum, to Renan, to John Murray and to the Hermitage². Masson died in 1997³.