Reginald Campbell Thompson
Reginald Campbell Thompson was a British archaeologist, assyriologist, and cuneiformist. He excavated at Nineveh, Ur, Nebo and Carchemish among many other sites.Biography
Thompson was born in Kensington, and educated at Colet Court, St Paul's School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read oriental languages.
In 1904 he found the remains of the temple of Nabu in Nineveh, later destroyed in 2016 by Islamic State.
In 1918 Mesopotamia 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, R. C. 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 First World War he held a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.
The writer Agatha Christie was invited by Thompson, along with her husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan, to the excavation site at Nineveh in 1931. She dedicated her story Lord Edgware Dies to "Dr and Mrs Campbell Thompson". In return he dedicated his novel Digger's Fancy to "Agatha and Max Mallowan".
He died in 1941 aged 64 while serving in the Home Guard River Patrol on the River Thames.
