Veronica Tatton-Brown

Veronica Tatton-Brown spent more than thirty years as the British Museum's curator of ancient Cyprus², and published the Museum's manuscripts and correspondence on its Cypriot excavations, including the notebook from its 1896 dig at Enkomi^3,4.

She joined the Museum staff in 1974 as the formal curator of ancient Cyprus, then under the name Veronica Wilson. She came from doctoral work at Oxford on the Cesnola Sarcophagus¹. One of her first tasks was to help Donald Harden with the Museum's catalogue of glass, which included a good deal of early Cypriot glass¹. In 1979 the Museum and the Birmingham Museum held the exhibition Cyprus BC, run with the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, and she contributed the Iron Age chapter to its book together with David Frankel, Donald Bailey and Geoffrey House¹. Kiely's text says the book was edited by Brian Cook, while his bibliography lists it under her name as editor^1,10.

In 1987 the A. G. Leventis Gallery of Cypriot Antiquities opened in the Museum, and Fisher reports that she oversaw its installation². The same year she published the Museum handbook Ancient Cyprus, which appeared in a second edition in 1997^1,11. Her shorter work from these years includes "Two Finds Allegedly from Rantidi"¹² and the Classical to Roman chapter in Archaeology in Cyprus 1960-1985¹³, the volume of Vassos Karageorghis⁸.

Gathering the archives

In 1997 she wrote that the work of Olivier Masson had inspired her to try to collect together all the archives in the British Museum concerning Cyprus. Her paper, published in his memory, described the departmental records, the Keepers' reports, the Trustee Minutes, the Letter Books and the Central Archives³. The full list of the Museum's excavation manuscripts and correspondence on Cyprus appeared in 2001 in the proceedings of the Museum's 1998 colloquium on nineteenth-century Cyprus, a volume she also edited^15,16.

In 2003 she published a transcription of the notebook kept at the Museum's 1896 excavations at Enkomi, tomb by tomb, with a comparison to the account A. S. Murray printed in Excavations in Cyprus (1900)⁴. The 1896 work was led by A. S. Murray from March to May, then by Percy Christian, then by A. H. Smith, and was funded by the Turner bequest⁴.

Help to other scholars

Her access to the Museum's papers shows up in the footnotes of others. Masson thanks her for communicating from the Museum's archives the letter in which Colonna-Ceccaldi offered his Cypriot collection⁵. In 1996 she told Masson that the Lawrence-Cesnola funerary stele from Tremetousha, now BM 1917.7-1.25021, had been the subject of a dispute between two Museum departments before it was registered in Greek and Roman Antiquities⁶. Thomas Kiely writes that she aided many scholars⁹.

She edited the proceedings of the Museum's 1988 colloquium, Cyprus and the East Mediterranean in the Iron Age (1989), which carried Masson's paper on the correspondence of the Palma di Cesnola brothers^5,14.

Honours and death

Her work was marked by a volume of the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes, number 35, in 2005, titled Hommage à Veronica Tatton-Brown⁷. In 2009 Kiely edited the festschrift Ancient Cyprus in the British Museum: Essays in Honour of Veronica Tatton-Brown, which opens with an essay by Lesley Fitton and includes Lindy Crewe's study of Enkomi Tomb 66². Fisher's review of that volume, published in 2012, records that she had died in March 2012².