Sidney Smith (Assyriologist)


Sidney Smith was an Assyriologist who has been described as the architect of Mesopotamian studies.

Life

He was born in Leeds, 29 August 1889, studied in City of London School, and went to Queens' College, Cambridge on a Classical Exhibition. During WWI he served as a subaltern in an infantry battalion. In 1955 he retired to Barcombe, near Lewes in Sussex.
Smith was married to Mary , the daughter of his cousin Henry Wilfred Parker, in 1927. Together they had one son, Harry Smith, an Egyptologist and academic, and one daughter.

Work

His life's work focussed on Semitic philology, political geography and Mesopotamian archaeology. He was appointed to the British Museum in 1914, but took up his post in 1919, eventually becoming the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. He was active in teaching, being a lecturer in Accadian Assyriology at King's College, London. This overlapped with appointments at the new Institute of Archaeology from 1934.
He was the Director of Antiquities and Director of the Iraq Museum. While there, he and his wife brefriended Smith's colleague Max Mallowan and his wife, the novelist Agatha Christie, with Christie dedicating her novel The Moving Finger "To my Friends Sydney and Mary Smith".
His was work was recognised when he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1941.
He retired from British Museum on grounds of ill-health in 1948, but then immediately took up the Chair of Ancient Semitic Languages and Civilization at University College London.

Selected publications