Sybille Haynes
|
Sybille Haynes MBE |
|
|---|---|
| Born |
Sybille Overhoff 3 July 1926 |
| Spouse(s) | Denys Haynes |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Goethe University Frankfurt |
| Doctoral advisor | Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Classical archaeology and ancient history |
| Sub discipline | Etruscology |
| Institutions |
British Museum Corpus Christi College, Oxford |
Sybille Haynes, MBE (née Overhoff; born 3 July 1926) is a British expert on Etruscology. She grew up and was educated in Germany and Austria before moving to the UK in the 1950s. She worked with Etruscan artefacts at the British Museum for many years as well as publishing numerous books, for fellow scholars and also for the general public. In the 1980s she joined the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Born Sybille Overhoff on 3 July 1926 to Edith née Kloeppel, her German mother, and Julius Overhoff, her Austrian father, she was one of five siblings including her twin sister Elfriede Knauer, an archaeologist. She grew up in a cultured family in Berlin, Frankfurt and Austria but her schooling was interrupted by the Nazi regime. She had to join Nazi youth organisations and spent a year doing compulsory labour in harsh conditions. After the war things remained difficult for some time and she studied Chinese while waiting for Frankfurt University to reopen in 1947. However, she had always been interested in the antiquities collected by her maternal great-grandfather, the sculptor and art historian Melchior zur Straßen, and had a long-standing wish to study classical archaeology, and in particular, Etruscology. Once at the Goethe University Frankfurt she studied classical archaeology, ancient history, art history and ethnology and found vacation work in museums in Paris, Rome, and London before graduating summa cum laude in December 1950. She went on to write a thesis on Etruscan bronze mirrors, supervised and encouraged by Guido von Kaschnitz.
While she was helping at the British Museum in 1950, where the Greek and Roman department had suffered severe bomb damage, she met Denys Haynes (1913-1994), later Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, whom she married in January 1957. She had also come to know the previous Keeper, Bernard Ashmole, who offered her a voluntary position in the department where her work included answering questions about Etruscan subjects and handling correspondence in German and Italian. She described this as an opportunity to study and learn. Amongst her writings were two booklets for the museum on Etruscan bronze utensils and Etruscan sculpture. She also published regularly in international journals and was made a foreign member of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici in 1965. In 1976, the year she was awarded an MBE, Haynes was responsible for the opening of the first ever Etruscan gallery in the classical department of the British Museum. In 1981 she was honoured by the Order of the Dignitari dell'Ombra della Sera in Volterra.
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