Émilia Masson was born in
Belgrade on May 24 1940. She studied in
Yugoslavia and in
France, and her doctoral dissertation
Recherches sur les plus anciens emprunts sémitiques en grec (Research on the most ancient
Semitic loanwords in
Greek) was published in Paris in 1967. She also published on the Hittite language, and from the 1980s she began to focus particularly on Anatolian studies and on Bronze Age religious practices, publishing books on religious sites in the Hittite city of
Yazılıkaya in Turkey and on the Bronze Age rock-carvings of the
Vallée des merveilles in the French Alps. After Masson's death on August 7 2017 in Paris, her archives, along with her husband's, were donated by their daughter Diane to the ''Centre d'Études Chypriotes'' (Centre for Cypriot Studies); they are now divided between the
University of Paris Nanterre, the Fédération Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, and the
Louvre Museum's Department of Eastern Antiquities.
Personal life The Massons had two daughters, Ariane (about whose death from cancer Masson wrote a memoir, ''Quand la vie s'en va'' [When life goes away]) and Diane. ==Selected publications==