Olivier Masson

Masson told an interviewer in 1986 that chance brought him to Cyprus: Schaeffer, excavating at Enkomi, asked the Sorbonne for a young researcher with an interest in inscriptions to work on those of Enkomi, and his first visit to the island was in 1954³⁰. Antoine Hermary describes the 1950s as marked by Masson's research for his thesis, published in 1961 as the first volume of the École française d'Athènes's series Études chypriotes, created on the initiative of its director Georges Daux⁴².

Les Inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques gathers every syllabic inscription of any importance, arranged by where it came from, district by district and locality by locality^1,34. In Sznycer's judgement Masson was the first to establish the Cypriot syllabary definitively, with sound translations and detailed commentaries¹. In April 1962 Roger Milliex wrote to Schaeffer that a copy had been presented officially to Archbishop Makarios on his first visit to the French Cultural Centre, which he came to inaugurate on 7 March³⁵. A second edition with supplementary content followed in 1983³⁰. After 1978, Masson said, he was entrusted with publishing the inscriptions locality by locality: The Syllabic Inscriptions of Rantidi, in English, came out in 1983, and a book on Kouklia, in French, was expected towards the end of 1986³⁰.

From 1957 he was interested in where the Dhrymou inscriptions had been found, and an inquiry at Dhrymou by an employee of the Antiquities Service allowed him to write on it³⁷. In 1960 V. Antoni Litras led him to the site at Golgoi, where Masson placed the principal sanctuary most probably about 500 metres south-east of the chapel of Ayios Photios³⁶. In 1973 he asked Annie Caubet, then a member of the French mission at Salamis, to make a rapid survey of the Trapeza region³⁸.

Preparing the Rantidi publication gave him in 1979 his first more than fleeting visit to Kouklia, and he returned to stay there with Sznycer in 1981, checking the original inscriptions for his Kouklia volume¹². Sznycer remembered that trip above all: for two weeks, in the company and car of Jacques-Claude Courtois, they criss-crossed the island visiting its archaeological sites¹. Only in 1988 could Masson make a rapid visit to the Dhrymou region, with Dimitris Michaelidis, then responsible for antiquities in the Paphos district; setting out from Kouklia, they stopped first at Ayia Moni³⁷. At the Pierides Foundation's symposium in Larnaca in 1986 he spoke on the ancient dialect of Paphos³⁰.

Vassos Karageorghis remembered him as a colleague and very close friend who came often to Cyprus and worked with him and Jacqueline Karageorghis on varied subjects of Cypriot archaeology¹⁰. The acknowledgements of the annual Chronique des fouilles et découvertes archéologiques à Chypre show him rereading the typescript for 1963, completing the epigraphy for 1977, and still rereading the whole French text for 1992^39,40,41. Hermary recalls that when the French mission at Amathus was set up in 1975, Masson put at its disposal all his files on the earlier excavations of the site, the inscriptions in particular, and in 1979 published with Pierre Aupert the first article of the series "Inscriptions d'Amathonte"⁴⁵.

According to the foreword of the first Cahier, the idea of a Centre d'études chypriotes in Paris was born among a few friends of Cyprus at a colloquium of the Musée de l'Homme in November 1982²⁸. The Centre was founded at Paris X-Nanterre in 1983, announced by a circular of May 1983 signed by Masson²⁸. He was its first president, from 1983 to 1997, and the founder, director and principal writer of the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes, two issues a year from 1984^1,29. His foreword to the first number asked for a field as wide and multidisciplinary as possible, covering the island's culture in all periods, and excluded all political debate²⁸.

The editors of the 1997 Cahier wrote that for several years the Centre had no office and each member worked at home; Annie Caubet obtained a space for it in the Louvre's Department of Oriental Antiquities⁴⁴. Despite some criticism Masson kept to a somewhat home-made presentation, and he saw the Cahiers as a means of making known unpublished documents on Cyprus, which, in the editors' words, he tracked down as a tireless hunter in museums and libraries across the world⁴⁴.

Sznycer wrote that Masson loved like no one else to search archives, museum stores and private collections, with the soul of a detective, and that his favourite figures were the Colonna-Ceccaldi brothers and still more the Cesnola brothers, on whom he amassed period photographs and autographs¹. Anna G. Marangou writes that he studied Cesnola's character more than anyone else, going through thousands of letters scattered across Europe and the United States and the archives of the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the Hermitage, the Berlin Museums and the Louvre³². In his last essay he wrote that in 1960 he had known only a very few pages of Cesnola's letters; he began to use them in a short article of 1988 and found a series written to the publisher John Murray at the time Murray brought out Cesnola's Cyprus².

About the middle of November 1996, Emilia Masson writes, he learned that his life was nearing its end, and his one concern was to write as much as possible². Near the end of his life he found that a granddaughter of Cesnola was living in the United States and suggested to Joan Mertens of the Metropolitan Museum and to Karageorghis that they visit her². He added the date 5 February 1997 at the bottom of the last page of his Cesnola essay². None of the pieces of his last three months reached a final version, and his pupil Laurent Dubois, his colleague Thomas Drew-Bear and Emilia Masson did their best to complete them².

The Société française d'Égyptologie reported that he died of a cancer declared late³¹. The sources disagree on the day of his death^32,33,43. A colloquium in his memory at the 99th annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America gave it as 23 February 1997, as does Wikidata; Marangou wrote that he died on 3 February 1997, and the German authority file gives 2 March 1997^14,32,33,43. Marangou's day stands against the date of 5 February 1997 that he wrote on his essay².

Cahier 27, of 1998, became the Mélanges Olivier Masson¹. Its editors wrote that dedicating it to him joined the wish of his closest friends, and that it included unpublished articles of his, one under the pseudonym Léon Fivel, which he had sometimes used⁴⁴. The documents he used over his years of work on 19th-century archaeology, among them his notes and copies of the letters and articles on the Cesnola collections, are in the Library of the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, to which his widow gave his archives³².