Humfry Payne

Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne ( born February 19, 1902 in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, † May 9, 1936 in Athens ) was an English classical archaeologist and director of the British School at Athens from 1929 until his death.

Humfry Payne was the only son of Edward John Payne, a historian at University College Oxford, and his wife Emma LH Pertz. His older sister was the astronomer Cecilia Payne- Gaposchkin. Payne attended Westminster School and then Christ Church College in Oxford, where he completed his classical studies with excellent results. In 1926 he married the journalist Dilys Powell.

After the study followed by research grants from the Christchurch College and an assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, which he used for Studies in the Archaeology of the Mediterranean countries. In 1927 he won the Conington Prize for classical learning for his work on Greek vase painting. He controlled partly the work of John D. Beazley and Alan Blakeway, with whom he jointly published work on the Attic black-figure ceramic from Naucratis. Subsequently, he studied and ranked the there also existing ceramic material from Corinth. The results of this research, presented in 1931, he found in the book " Necrocorinthia " which established his fame in archaeological circles worldwide.

From 1927 to 1929 Payne spent the summers during archaeological excavations on Crete in the area of ​​Knossos. In recognition of this work he became in 1929 director of the British School at Athens. In 1930 he initiated the excavations in Perachora, a settlement on the peninsula Geraneia in the Gulf of Corinth. Sanctuary and port facility were excavated from 1930-1933, 1939 and in the 1960s. The results, mainly written by Payne, were in the work " Perachora. Published The sanctuaries of Hera Akraia and Limenia " in 1940 by Thomas J. Dunbabin.

Payne also conducted research on the Achaean sculptures that were found in the 1880s and 1890s on the Acropolis in Athens. Published in 1936 under the title " Archaic marble sculpture from the Acropolis ", it confirmed his scientific reputation, could he but sculpture fragments together again, which were scattered in various museums, and establish a new approach to the study of archaic sculpture and sculpture.

He died in 1936 of a staph infection in the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens. He was buried in the cemetery of Agios Georgios in Mycenae. His grave stone bears the words " Do not weep for Adonis ".

Writings (selection )

• Protocorinthian vase painting. Keller, Berlin, 1933 (reprint Saverne, Mainz 1974).
• With Gerard Mackworth Young ( Photos): Archaic marble sculpture from the Acropolis. Cresset Press, Manchester, 1936.
• Perachora. Sanctuaries of Hera Akraia and Limenia. Excavations of the British School of Archaeology at Athens from 1930 to 1933. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1940 ( ed. by TJ Dunbabin ).