Sybille Haynes

Sybille Haynes, née Overhoff, was born in Germany to an Austrian father, Julius Overhoff, and a German mother, Edith Kloeppel Overhoff. She has a twin sister, Elfriede Knauer, who became an archaeologist. She grew up in a cultured household but her education was interrupted by the Nazi regime. She had to join Nazi youth organizations and spend a year doing compulsory labor. After World War II, she studied Chinese while waiting for the universities to reopen. She had always been fascinated by the antiquities collected by her maternal great-grandfather, the sculptor and art historian Melchior zur Strassen, and had a long-standing wish to study Etruscan archaeology. Once she began 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. Sybille graduated summa cum laude in 1950 with a thesis on Etruscan bronze mirrors. She then emigrated to the UK in 1951 and worked with Etruscan artifacts at the British Museum. There she met Denys Haynes, later Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, whom she married in 1951. She worked at the British Museum for many years and published numerous books for fellow scholars and for the general public. Among her writings also were booklets for the museum on Etruscan bronze utensils and Etruscan sculpture. In 1985, she published Etruscan Bronzes and in 1987 a novel set in the Etruscan era called The Augur's Daughter (first published in German in 1981). Other books include Etruscan Sculpture (1971) and Land of the Chimaera (1974). She also published regularly in international journals and was made a foreign member of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici in Florence in 1965. In 1976, she was awarded an MBE and that same year was responsible for the opening of the first-ever Etruscan gallery in the classical department of the British Museum. In the 1980s, she moved to Oxford University and joined the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College. In 2000, her book Etruscan Civilization: A Cultural History was published and hailed as the definitive work on the subject. A Sybille Haynes Lecturership in Etruscan and Italic Archaeology at Somerville College, Oxford was created in 2013.