Reginald Campbell Thompson
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
archaeologist, assyriologist, and cuneiformist
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
. He excavated at Nineveh
Nineveh
Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and capital of the Neo Assyrian Empire. Its ruins are across the river from the modern-day major city of Mosul, in the Ninawa Governorate of Iraq....
, Ur
Ur
Ur was an important city-state in ancient Sumer located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate...
, Nebo
Nebo
Nebo may refer to:* Nebo , a Babylonian god* Nabau, a Biblical townNebo: In ancient times Nebo, or Nabu was the Chaldean deity of the Babylonians and Assyrians...
and Carchemish
Carchemish
Carchemish or Kargamış was an important ancient city of the Mitanni, Hittite and Neo Assyrian Empires, now on the frontier between Turkey and Syria. It was the location of an important battle between the Babylonians and Egyptians, mentioned in the Bible...
among many other sites.
He was born in Kensington
Kensington
Kensington is a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. An affluent and densely-populated area, its commercial heart is Kensington High Street, and it contains the well-known museum district of South Kensington.To the north, Kensington is...
, and educated at Colet Court
Colet Court
Colet Court is a preparatory school for boys aged 7 to 13 in Barnes, London. It forms the preparatory department of St Paul's School, to which most Colet Court pupils go at the age of 13.-History:...
, St. Paul's School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Oriental (Hebrew and Aramaic) Languages.
In 1918 Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
fell into British hands and the Trustees of the British Museum applied to have an archaeologist attached to the Army in the field to protect antiquities from injury. As a Captain in the Intelligence Service serving in the region and a former assistant in the British Museum, Campbell Thompson was commissioned to start the work. After a short investigation of Ur, he dug at Shahrain and the mounds at Tell al-Lahm.
After the war he held a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford
Merton College, Oxford
Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...
.
He died in 1941 aged 64 while serving in the Home Guard River Patrol on the River Thames.
- R. Campbell Thompson The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia 2 vols. London, 1903-1904.
- Semitic Magic: its Origins and Development. London, 1908
- Archaeologia, Vol LXX (1921)
- Late Babylonian letters: transliterations and translations of a series of letters written in Babylonian cuneiform, chiefly during the reigns of Nabonidus, Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius
- A century of exploration at Nineveh, with Richard Wyatt Hutchinson
- The epic of Gilgamish, text, transliteration and notes 1930
Sources
- The British Museum
- A season's work at Ur, Al-'Ubaid, Abu Shahrain (Eridu) and elsewhere being an unofficial account of the British Museum archaeological mission to Babylonia 1919, Harry Reginald Holland Hall, Methuen, 1930