David Hawkins, my colleague and friend, who has died aged 83, was one of the world’s leading scholars of the languages of ancient Turkey.
He spent all his career at Soas University of London. He was appointed fellow in Hittite at Soas in 1964 and retired as professor in 2005. Hittite, the oldest known Indo-European language, was then only taught at Oxford, by Oliver Gurney, to whom David went to learn the language in which he had been appointed.
Thus equipped, he began his life’s work, the collection in one place of inscriptions in hieroglyphic Luwian. Luwian was known to be related to Hittite, but the hieroglyphic script still presented a formidable obstacle to understanding Luwian texts.
The inscriptions were scattered about Turkey and north Syria on stone monuments and rock faces. David visited them all at least once. He was a talented artist and made definitive and reliable drawings of them for the first time. His indefatigable efforts in the field, and his ready collaboration with others, led to the key breakthroughs that saw Luwian finally becoming well understood.
After more than 30 years’ labour, the first parts of his monumental Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions were published in 2000. Two decades later the final volume of the Corpus went to press. Together they provide a meticulous record of all known Luwian inscriptions, forming one of those rare achievements: an enduring monument of scholarship that sets a whole academic field on firm footings for the first time.
David was born in Exmouth, Devon, to Major John Hawkins, an officer in the British Indian army, and his wife, Audrey (nee Spencer), who had just returned from Quetta (now in Pakistan) on one of the last trains to cross France before it fell in 1940.
After the second world war they exchanged army life for a farm in Devon, which as David grew up engendered in him a strong preference for country over town. From Bradfield college, Berkshire, he went to University College, Oxford, to study classics. Then he spent two years at the Institute of Archaeology in London before joining Soas.
David’s leading role in the decipherment of hieroglyphic Luwian and his high distinction as the world’s pre-eminent expert in Luwian inscriptions led to his election in 1993 as a fellow of the British Academy and to other honours.
More important to him were the tributes from closer colleagues. Many scholars are celebrated by a festschrift at a milestone birthday. Some are so honoured twice, on first one birthday and then another. It is a measure of David’s place in academia that when he turned 70, he received two celebratory volumes on the same day. The presentations took place in the place he loved best: his garden in Oxfordshire, where many enjoyed his friendship, cooking and unmatched love of good company.
David is survived by his partner, the writer Geoff Ryman, and by a brother, Timothy, and a sister, Denzil. David and Geoff met in Oxford in 1973 and entered into a civil partnership in 2006.
