Reginald Campbell Thompson

Thompson was born in Kensington, and educated at Colet Court, St Paul's School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read oriental (Hebrew and Aramaic) languages.

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.[1] She dedicated her story Lord Edgware Dies to "Dr and Mrs Campbell Thompson".

He died in 1941 aged 64 while serving in the Home Guard River Patrol on the River Thames.

• A Century of Exploration at Nineveh. London, Luzac, 1900. Joint author: Richard Wyatt Hutchinson.
• The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, 2 vols. London, Luzac, 1903–1904.
• 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. London, Luzac, 1906.
• Semitic Magic: its Origins and Development. London, 1908.
• Archaeologia, Vol LXX (1921)
• The epic of Gilgamish, text, transliteration and notes. 1930.

• The British Museum
• Harry Reginald Holland Hall, 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, Methuen, 1930.

• British Museum biography
• Short biography by K. Kris Hirst
• British Academy Obituary