Mabel Lang


Mabel Louise Lang was an American archaeologist and scholar of Classical Greek and Mycenaean culture.

Biography

Lang took her first degree at Cornell University in 1939 and was awarded her PhD at Bryn Mawr College in 1943, when she also joined the faculty of the college. She was a faculty member there until 1991 and professor emerita until her death. She was appointed as Paul Shorey Professor of Greek in 1971. In 1981 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She was the author of several books on Classical Greek law and culture, and was a contributor to the deciphering of the Linear B inscriptions found at Pylos. She was also the first, in 1969, to attempt to interpret the patterns on the painted floors of the megaron at Pylos, suggesting that the designs represented different types of stone. As well as her publications on the Bronze Age frescoes and Linear B tablets at Pylos, she also wrote works on the Greek historiographers Herodotus and Thucydides, and on the excavations of the Athenian Agora with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, on which she worked as an archaeologist. In 1982 she delivered the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College, and these were later published as Herodotean Narrative and Discourse.
The body of unfinished work which she left at her death was published posthumously by her colleagues in 2011 as Thucydidean Narrative and Discourse.

Selected works