Reproduced by permission from The Independent, Obituaries, 18 August 2003.

Sarah Clackson

The death of Sarah Clackson at the age of just 37 is a blow for Coptology
and the study of early Christian Egypt when, as Coptic, the Greek script was
adopted to write the Egyptian language.

An elegance of appearance unusual among academics combined with a strong
professional drive to make this scholar a force to be reckoned with. An
excellent golfer in earlier years, as an individual she was fun to be with,
and a loyal friend.

Born Sarah Quinn in 1965, the youngest daughter of Peter and Audrey Quinn,
she attended Loughborough High School, where the influence of her Classics
teacher and the school library made up for much else. At St John's College,
Cambridge, she studied Classics followed by Egyptology.

>From the start, her linguistic interests were clear; she was not to be
deterred from her chosen career, specialising in Coptic, by a lack of
funding for postgraduate work. She showed ingenuity in searching out
short-term grants, interesting projects and consultancy work to develop her
growing expertise. In this way she put order into various manuscript and
papyrological collections in the Cambridge University Library. Her first
publication (in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1991) was of a New Kingdom
stela from Girton College, where she sorted out the Egyptian collection.

A part-time PhD at University College London was completed in four years, in
1996, resulting in her first major book, Coptic and Greek texts Relating to
the Hermopolite Monastery of Apa Apollo (2000). At the same time, she was
working as Project Officer for the Manichaean Documentation Centre based
first at the Institute of Classical Studies, London, and then at Warwick
University; The Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, volume i, Texts from the
Roman Empire (1998), bears her name among its authors, as does The
Elephantine Papyri in English (1996).

It was, however, the monastery of Apollo at Bawit that was central to her
work. Careful study of the language of surviving texts on papyrus, stone or
pieces of broken pot, the formulae of receipts, items of income and
expenditure and local accounts served to illuminate the life and economy of
a key monastic community. A recent article ("Fish and Chits: the Synodontis
schall", 2002) illustrated the importance of Nile fish in the diet of the
times. Her publication of these and other texts helped bring new standards
of presentation to the practices of Coptic papyrology. The investment was
made, the potential was great, with so much more on the way.

Research appointments followed her doctorate: the Eugénie Strong Fellowship
in Arts at Girton (1996-98) and the Lady Wallis Budge Fellowship in
Egyptology at Christ's College (from 1998). Based in Cambridge, she was in
wide demand as a lecturer and teacher: her (joint) masterclass in Coptic at
Yale University (1997) was followed by invitations from Florence and Cairo,
Leiden, Leuven, Lille and London, Oxford and Vienna. She became a well-known
presence in her subject both in Europe and the United States; she served on
the Board of the International Association for Coptic Studies, the Committee
of the Egypt Exploration Society and in other professional capacities.

In her marriage to James Clackson, whom she met when still a sixth-former in
Loughborough, she gained great happiness, intellectual stimulus and support
which was mutual. They made a striking couple on the local scene; "blissful"
is how she recently described this long-standing relationship.

When cancer was first diagnosed in 1998, she faced the threat positively,
with courage and mordant good-humour. Her ability to enjoy life to the full
was strongly on display in these final years. Once the outcome was clear,
her talent for order and control so constantly exercised in her professional
work was directed to sorting her files, to making available for others her
still unpublished work.

Coptology is an international field; her library goes to Warsaw and her
files to the Griffith Institute in Oxford. Her name will be commemorated,
her elegant self remembered.

Dorothy J. Thompson

Sarah Joanne Quinn, Coptologist: born Leicester 11 December 1965; Lady
Wallis Budge Research Fellow, Christ's College, Cambridge 1998-2003; married
1991 James Clackson; died Cambridge 10 August 2003.