Obituary: Anna Morpurgo Davies

Abstract

Historical linguists are sometimes thought to spend their time deciphering unknown scripts and languages, although in reality most of them just look at the history of perfectly well-understood tongues. Anna Morpurgo Davies, a world-leading figure in the study of Ancient Greek and Anatolian, who has died aged seventy-seven, was among the select few to do both. Born in Milan, Italy, daughter of Maria (nee Castelnuovo) and Augusto Morpurgo, she moved to Rome upon the death of her father in 1939. For a (secular) Jewish family those were difficult years, and Anna survived the war only with luck and in hiding. Attending the Liceo Classico Giulio Cesare in Rome, and inspired by her grandfather, Guido Castelnuovo, a leader of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, she initially felt drawn towards mathematics, but then decided to study classics at the University of Rome, out of interest in classical literature and the history of religion. In a compulsory course on historical grammar, one of her teachers, Carlo Gallavotti, introduced her to Linear B, a syllabic script used to write Greek during the later second millennium bc, which had only just been deciphered. Fascinated by the prospect of participating in the discovery of an entirely new period of Ancient Greek language and culture, she turned towards historical linguistics as the necessary key to it. After graduating in 1959, she became Gallavotti’s assistant and began to work on the first lexicon of Mycenaean, the early dialect in which the Linear B texts were written; this was published in 1963 and remained a standard work for several decades. In 1961 she obtained a junior fellowship at the newly founded Centre for Hellenic Studies in Washington. Until this point, Anna had been largely self-trained in linguistic theory; in the US, she had her first real experience of the world of theoretical linguistics. Although her own work was to remain focused on the historical and comparative study of languages, she acquired a profound interest in general linguistics, too, so much so that she later became a driving force behind the establishment of a chair in linguistics at Oxford. Still in Washington, she met the historian John K. Davies, whom she married a year later and with whom she moved to Oxford in 1962; the marriage was dissolved in 1978, but Oxford remained the centre of her personal and academic life.