ABSTRACT
R. M. Dawkins (1871-1955) was the first holder of the Bywater and Sotheby Professorship of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford from 1920 to 1939. In his first job as an archaeologist he excavated a number of sites in Greece, notably the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta and the Minoan city at Palaikastro in eastern Crete. His long stay at the British School at Athens, of which he served as Director from 1906 to 1914, brought him into contact with post-classical Greece, and he soon became a historical linguist and dialectologist of the Greek language in its medieval and modern phases. His most notable contribution to this field was his timely study of the Cappadocian dialects of modern Greek2 - timely because within a decade of its publication the speakers of these dialects had been ejected from their homeland and resettled in various parts of Greece. Through the collection of folk-tales as material for linguistic study he gradually became interested in mod-
1 Leontios Makluliras, Recital concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus, entitled 'Chronicle', edited with a translation and notes by R. M. Dawkins (Oxford, 1931).
