William Foxwell Albright

W. F. Albright's dating of the Cypriot pottery found in Palestine put him among the archaeologists who, from the early 1940s, attacked the chronology Einar Gjerstad had built for Iron Age Cyprus from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's finds¹. The argument turned on the Cypro-Geometric period and on Black-on-Red ware. The first report of the American Expedition to Idalion cites Albright's contributions of 1943 and 1953, with papers by G. W. Van Beek and by Maisler (Mazar) from the early 1950s. In 1953 the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research printed Albright's "Correspondence with Professor Einar Gjerstad on the Chronology of 'Cypriote' Pottery from Early Iron Levels in Palestine"¹.

The Idalion report set out where the two sides stood. Albright, G. Ernest Wright and Van Beek tended to place the start of the Cypro-Geometric period at 1050/1000 BC; Gjerstad put it at about 850 BC. The report's authors suggested that the excavation at Idalion might show the Cypriot "Dark Age" to be an illusion¹.

William Foxwell Albright was born on 24 May 1891 at Coquimbo in Chile, the son of American Methodist missionaries, and took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1916. He directed the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem from 1922 to 1929 and again from 1933 to 1936, and excavated at Tell el-Fûl in 1922 and at Tell Beit Mirsim in four seasons between 1926 and 1932². His Tell Beit Mirsim volumes of 1932, 1933 and 1943 appear in the Idalion bibliography¹. From 1930 until his retirement in 1958 he was W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages at Johns Hopkins, where Wright was among his students. He died on 19 September 1971².