Identity area
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Title
Date(s)
- 1894 - 1941 (Creation)
Level of description
Extent and medium
Five handwritten notebooks and two printed pamphlets
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Reginald Campbell Thompson was an archaeologist, Assyriologist, cuneiformist and fiction writer, along with being a member of the Royal Asiatic Society.
He was educated at St. Paul’s School in 1894, before becoming a student of Caius College, Cambridge, 1895-1899. After graduating form the college he became an assistant in the Egyptian and Assyrian Department, British Museum, a position he held from 1899 to 1905, during which he published his first book, ‘The Reports of Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon’ (1900) and undertook several trips to Algeria (1901), Egypt (1902), Tripoli (1903) and Iraq (1904-1905). During his trip in Iraq he conducted an excavation at Nineveh and found the remains of the temple of Nabu.
After resigning from the British Museum in December 1905 Thompson entered the service of the Sudanese government, where he conducted a survey until summer 1906, after which he accepted the post of Assistant Professor of Semitic Language at the University of Chicago, which he held from 1907 to 1909. In the following years Thompson continued with his excavations in the Middle East, including in Carchemish (1911), at a Coptic site in Wadi Sargah (1913-1914) and – interrupted by his service for the Mesopotamian Campaign during WWI – in Abu Shahrain (1918). He returned to Nineveh for an excavation from 1927 to 1932.
Alongside his lifelong interest in archaeology and Assyrian studies, Thompson also had a passion for literature, which resulted in three fictional works, including ‘A Song of Araby’ (1921) and ‘A Mirage of Sheba’ (1923) – both published under the pseudonym of John Guisborough – and ‘A Digger’s Fancy: A Melodrama’ (1938).
Repository
Archival history
These papers were given to John Nicholas Postgate former professor of Assyriology at the University of Cambridge by Reginald Campbell Thompson's daughter in 1966. He then donated them to the Royal Asiatic Society on 30 August 2024. The donation included one additional notebook entitled ‘Catalogue of Assyrian Letters, etc’, which had been originally catalogued as RCT/6, but was later re-catalogued as SC65. The original sequence of numbering is maintained.
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
The papers were acquired from John Nicholas Postgate via the Griffith Institute of Oxford.
Content and structure area
Scope and content
A set of five notebooks entitled:
- “Assyrian Inscriptions R. C. Thompson, 1894”
- “Algeria 1901”
- “Kodak Sinaiticus or Grads and Ghouls, 1902”
- “Tripoli 1903” and “A year in Nineveh, 1904–1905”
- Newspaper cuttings and assortments of notes and letters
Two printed pamphlets entitled:
- “A list of words and phrases in the Basrah Dialect of Arabic”
- “On traces of an indefinite article in Assyrian”
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Conditions governing access
Open. Please contact the archivist. Details can be found here : https://royalasiaticarchives.org/. The archive is open on Tuesdays, Thursday and Fridays 10-5 Access is to any researcher without appointment but it will help if an appointment is made via phone or email. Please bring photo ID.
Conditions governing reproduction
Digital photography (without flash) for research purposes may be permitted upon completion of a copyright declaration form, and with respect to current UK copyright law.
Language of material
- Akkadian
- Arabic
- English
- French
- German
- Hebrew
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Related units of description
More details about the related material below can be found on the RAS Library catalogue: https://ras.koha-ptfs.co.uk/
- Assyrian Medical Prescriptions Against Simmatu 'Poison'
- Assyrian Prescriptions for Treating Bruises or Swellings
- A Dictionary of Assyrian Botany
- A Dictionary of Assyrian Chemistry and Geology
- The Assyrian Herbal: A Monograph on the Assyrian Vegetable Drugs
- On the Chemistry of the Ancient Assyrians
- A Century of Exploration at Nineveh
- A Catalogue of the Late Babylonian Tablets in the Bodleian Library, Oxford
- The Prisms of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal Found at Nineveh, 1927-28
- Assyrian Medical Texts from the Originals in the British Museum
- The Epic of Gilgamish: A New Translation from a Collation of the Cuneiform Tablets in the British Museum Rendered Literally into English Hexameters
- A New Decipherment of the Hittite Hieroglyphics
- The Epic of Gilgamish: Text, Transliteration and Notes
- The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great, on the Rock of Behistûn in Persia
- Photographic documentation of the excavation at Nineveh [Glass Slide.08]
- Photographs of the 1918 excavation at Abu Shahrain [Glass Slide.10]
- Photographs documenting Reginald Campbell Thompson's travels and service in WWI [Glass Slide.11]
- A film of his excavations in Iraq - digital version can be found at https://royalasiaticsociety.org/film-footage-of-excavations-in-iraq/.
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This catalogue was created by Alex D Williamson, RAS volunteer, under the supervision of Nancy Charley, RAS Archivist, in 2025.