William Hepburn Buckler FBA (1867–1952) was a distinguished diplomat and epigrapher. Born to American parents in Paris, he completed an undergraduate and subsequent legal qualification in Cambridge (1887—1891). As a practising lawyer in Baltimore, he gained an interest in antiquity through his wife, the Girton-educated classicist Georgina Grenfell. He most notably became the Assistant Director, and part-funder, of the American excavations at Sardis 1910–1914. After a break during the war — during which he served as ‘competent assistant’ in the American Embassy at London 1914–1918 and negotiator at Versailles — he undertook the publication of epigraphic material from Sardis. Lydian Inscriptions was published 1924, and Greek and Latin Inscriptions (with D. M. Robinson) in 1932. Following further excavations, he published Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua (MAMA) vols. IV–VI with William Moir Calder. Among other honours, Buckler received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford, where he lived from 1922, becoming an Associate Member of All Souls.
Buckler’s archives have been scattered across various institutions in the twentieth century. The CSAD archive consists of miscellanea relating to the Sardis excavations, particularly in preparation for his epigraphic publications. Alongside three notebooks, two boxes of glass plate negatives, and a folder of photographs, are the essential materials for the study of Lydian: forty-seven squeezes of Lydian-language inscriptions.
Lydian was an Indo-European language of the Anatolian family, distantly related to Hittite and Carian. Known to its users as ‘Sardian’ (sfardẽti-), it was written and spoken in Sardis and nearby from the Archaic well into the Hellenistic period. Lydian appeared on some of the earliest coinage in history and Lydian poetry was inscribed on gravestones in the Achaemenid Persian period. The Lydian alphabet was created after and following the Greek and Phrygian scripts. It quickly developed a distinct style of tall, narrow letters, written exclusively from right to left. Scriptio continua was not used (as in Greek) but words were separated with spaces. As such, Lydian writing is hard to confuse for its sister-script Greek, even as the two were used alongside one another in Sardis and Ephesus. Thankfully both the script and language are now fairly well-understood and most inscriptions can be read with few difficulties.
In Spring 2025 Fiona Phillips will be working with Prof. Annick Payne from the University Ca' Foscari to digitise the Buckler archive and make it openly accessible online.
