Name Lilian Jeffery | ||
Books The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece: A Study of the Origin of the Greek Alphabet and Its Development from the Eighth to the Fifth Centuries B.C. | ||
Lilian Hamilton Jeffery (5 January 1915 – 29 September 1986) was a British archaeologist, classical philologist and epigraphist best remembered for her 1961 work The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Building on the work of Adolf Kirchhoff and Antony E. Raubitschek, Jeffery surveyed the development of the Greek alphabet from its adoption down to the fifth century BC and in so doing established the chronology of archaic inscriptions.
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Biography
Lilian (Anne) Jeffery was born at Westcliff-on-Sea to a schoolmaster and lecturer in classics. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and in 1933 went up to Newnham College, Cambridge where she studied under Jocelyn Toynbee. She won the Walton Studenship to the British School at Athens in 1937, where she contributed to the work of Antony E. Raubitschek on the sculptural fragments of the Acropolis, co-publishing with him the 1949 book Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis. She served in the WAAF during the war; part of her duties included intelligence interpretation of aerial photographs. In 1946 she took up the position of research fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she remained for the rest of her career apart from a period of research at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton from September 1951 to June 1952.
Her archaeological work included field study with the British School at Old Smyrna (Bayrakli) in 1949. She also made major contributions to the study of Attic grave monuments and the epigraphical edition project Inscriptiones Graecae i3.
Her archive is preserved at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford, digitised and published online.