Maurice Pope (classical philologist)

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Maurice Wildon Montague Pope (born February 17, 1926 in London , † August 1, 2019 in Oxford ) was a British classical philologist . His specialty is research into the Cretan script ( Linear A ).

Pope graduated from Cambridge University . From 1949 he worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he was appointed lecturer in 1952 and professor in 1957. In 1957, he succeeded George Patrick Gould , who had also graduated from Cambridge University, the position of head of the Chair of Classical Philology. Together with the later famous classical scholars Gould, he published several articles about the Minoan Linear A .

In addition to linguistics, Pope was interested in archeology. He took part in archaeological expeditions, including in 1954 an underwater expedition from the British School at Athens , one of the archaeological institutes abroad in Athens, near Chios .

In 1960 he was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Cape Town University.

As early as 1959 he turned in a magazine article ( Universities in Ethnasia ) against the prevention of a Bantu-speaking university, which was to emerge from the University College of Fort Hare, by South African apartheid politicians. In August 1968 he resigned from his office and left the University in Cape Town in protest, as he was against the strong interference of the racist government in university politics. The government at the time forced the university administration to withdraw the offer of a position to the black social anthropologist Archie Mafeje, which also led to the first mass protests by students. Then Maurice Pope moved to Oxford University .

In the 1980s, in collaboration with Jacques Raison, he published a corpus of the inscriptions of the Minoan linear script A.

Fonts

  • The Story of Archaeological Decipherment, from Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Linear B. Scribner, New York 1975.
    • German edition: The riddles of ancient writings. Hieroglyphs, cuneiform, Linear B. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1978, ISBN 3-7857-0221-3 . (Translator: Anita Rieche ). - Other title: The riddle of the ancient writings. 1990.
    • Revised edition: The Story of Decipherment. From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script. Thames and Hudson, London 1999, ISBN 0-500-28105-X .
  • with Jacques Raison: Corpus transnuméré du Linéaire A. Louvain 1980.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date of death: Advertisement by Matthew Shelton, University of Cape Town , CLASSICISTS, August 13, 2019 (accessed August 13, 2019).
  2. ^ F. Smuts: Classical scholarship and the teaching of Classics at Cape Town and Stellenbosch. Pp. 22-23. (PDF; 1.56 MB) Retrieved on September 6, 2013 (English).
  3. ^ Maurice Pope: Universities in Ethnasia. ( Memento from January 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 20.7 MB). In: Africa South. Cape Town. Vol. 4, No. 1, 1959, pp. 41-49. Retrieved September 5, 2013.
  4. ^ John Daniel, Peter Vale: South Africa: Where were we looking in 1968? S. 142. (PDF; 721 kB)
  5. ↑ Review: Lionel Casson: The Story of Archaeological Decipherment, from Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Linear B. by Maurice Pope. In: Technology and Culture. Volume 17, 1976, pp. 530-531. ( JSTOR stable url ). Retrieved September 5, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Pope, Maurice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pope, Maurice W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British classical philologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 2019
Place of death Oxford