Lilian Hamilton Jeffery

Lilian Hamilton Jeffery (5 January 1915 to 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.

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. 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.

Selected works

• An Archaic Greek Inscription from Crete The British Museum Quarterly, v36 n1/2 (Autumn, 1971): 24-29
• Archaia grammata, some ancient Greek views. Berlin : W. de Gruyter, 1967
• Archaic Greece: The City States, c.700-500 B.C. Benn Feb 1976
• Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis : A catalogue of the inscriptions of the 6. and 5. centuries B. C. Ed. with the collaboration of Lilian H. Jeffery. Cambridge, Mass., 1949.
• Demiourgoi in the Archaic period Archeologia classica, no. 25-26, 1973-1974. p. 319-330.
• Inscriptiones Graecae / Vol. 1, Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno anteriores ; ediderunt David Lewis et Lilian Jeffery, adiuvante Eberhard Erxleben. Fasc. 2, Dedicationes, catalogi, termini, tituli sepulcrales, varia, tituli Attici extra Atticam reperti, addenda. Berolini ; Novi Eboraci : De Gruyter, 1994.
• 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. (Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology) Oxford University Press; First Edition (Dec 1961)
• Lykios son of Myron : the epigraphic evidence in Στήλη Τόμος Εις Μνήμην Νικολάου Κοντολέοντος p. 51-54
• Poinikastas and poinikazen, BM 1969, 4-2. 1 : a new archaic inscription from Crete Kadmos. Zeitschrift für vor- und frühgriechische Epigraphik, Bd. 9/ Heft 2. p. 118-154
• Some Nikai-statues at Olympia in the late fifth century B.C. Roma : G. Bretschneider, 1979

External links

• Memorial page published on the CSAD website based on David Lewis, Proceedings of the British Academy 73 (1987) pp 505-516.
• The Anne Jeffery Archive