Thompson (Reginald Campbell), 1876-1941

Reginald Campbell Thompson (21 August 1876 – 23 May 1941) was a British archaeologist, Assyriologist, and cuneiformist. He excavated at Nineveh, Ur, Nebo and Carchemish among many other sites.

Biography
Thompson was born at Cranley Place, South Kensington, the eldest of five children of Dr Reginald Edward Thompson (1834-1912) and Anne Isabella De Morgan,[1] and educated at Colet Court, St Paul's School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read oriental (Hebrew and Aramaic) languages.


Bronze head of an Akkadian king unearthed in Nineveh by Campbell Thompson's team
In 1904 he found the remains of the temple of Nabu in Nineveh,[2] which were destroyed in 2016 by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

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.[3] Thompson was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, and left to them two canisters of film. "The footage dates from the late 1920s/early 1930s and shows excavations in Iraq at the mound of Kouyunjik, scenes in the village of Nebi Yunus, across the Khosr river from Kouyunjik within the ancient city boundaries of Nineveh, and scenes in the city of Mosul, across the river Tigris from Nineveh". The film was digitised in 2016.[1]

The writer Agatha Christie was invited by Thompson, along with her husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan, to the excavation site at Nineveh in 1931.[4] She dedicated her story Lord Edgware Dies to "Dr and Mrs Campbell Thompson". In return he dedicated his melodrama in blank verse Digger's Fancy to "Agatha and Max Mallowan".[5]

Appointments
1899-1905 Assistant in the Egyptian and Assyrian Dept. of the British Museum
1906 Sudan Survey Dept.
1907-9 Assistant Professor in Semitic Languages, University of Chicago
1914-19 Served in Mesopotamia (Captain, Special List; mentioned four times in despatches)
1923-41 Fellow of Merton College, Oxford
1937-41 Shillito Reader in Assyriology at Oxford
Personal life
Reginald Campbell Thompson married Barbara Brodrick Robinson at St John’s, Putney on 19 September 1911. They had three children: Yoland(e) in 1914, Reginald Perronet in 1919 and John De Morgan in 1923. Reginald Perronet was a Flight Lieutenant in the RAFVR, and was killed on active service on 4 April 1941.[6] A memorial service was held at New College, Oxford on 14 June 1941.[7]

Reginald died on 23 May 1941 at Sowberry Court, Moulsford, aged 64. He lost his life while serving in the Home Guard, during a patrol on the River Thames.[6] His obituary in The Times said of him "Personally Thompson was of a fine, robust build, who could shoot, swim or sail a boat with anybody. The Norfolk broads were a haunt of his at one time, and at Oxford he kept a skiff of his own on the river".[8]

Barbara accompanied her husband on site for all four seasons of work at Nineveh.[1] She died on 25 June 1971, aged 84. Reginald, Barbara and their first son are buried at Sunningwell, close to the family home at Boars Hill.