Wilhelm Deecke

Wilhelm Deecke, a lycée teacher in Alsace, compiled the first corpus of Cypriot syllabic inscriptions, published in 1883, and read texts that others had dug up or copied in Cyprus^1,3. Born in Lübeck, he taught after 1871 at Strasbourg, then Bouxviller (Buchsweiler) and Mulhouse, and he came to the syllabary from Latin, Etruscan, Messapic, Faliscan and Lycian¹.

His first article on the script, written with his colleague Justus Siegismund, appeared in 1874, and in the following years he competed with Moriz Schmidt over readings^1,11. Masson notes that the 1874 paper gave too little credit to Lang and Smith, who had worked on the script before¹. Deecke followed it with Der Ursprung der kyprischen Sylbenschrift (1877) and a Nachtrag (1881), and the corpus itself appeared in Collitz's series of Greek dialect inscriptions^3,14. Marangou records his suggestion that the syllabary was related to Assyrian cuneiform¹⁰.

Others supplied him with texts. Inscriptions from the Lawrence-Cesnola collection, among them a statue base he read as Akestothemis and an Idalion bowl, were read by him in Luigi Palma di Cesnola's Salaminia⁷. In 1888 the Cyprus Exploration Fund's Paphos report printed his transcripts of the Kouklia inscriptions, made from drawings by Jan Six, who queried some readings⁴. In 1889 he advised David George Hogarth on a squeeze⁶, and in 1891 J. A. R. Munro checked his 1886 readings of Polis inscriptions against the originals in the Cyprus Museum⁵. T. B. Mitford later used the corpus for the Kourion texts⁹. In 1894 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter listed a "W. Deecke (Buchsweiler)" among the contributors to his planned Tamassos und Idalion⁸.