A Pilgrim’s Scrip

The Assyriologist and archaeologist Reginald Campbell Thompson (1876-1941) studied Hebrew at Cambridge and upon graduation moved into the department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum, where he developed remarkable skill in matching fragments of cuneiform tablets and transcribing their texts. He excavated at Nineveh and later produced a definitive edition of the trilingual inscription of Darius at Behistan in Iran. This 1915 work describes Thompson’s life ‘in the field’ at various sites in Egypt, the Sudan and western Asia. The difficulties and dangers of travel, the encounters with local people, and the management of an excavation are all described with enthusiasm and in melodramatic terms. Thompson lovingly records the daily life and traditions of the pre-1914 Middle East, perhaps feeling that he was witnessing a world that would soon be radically changed by the war. His Semitic Magic (1908) is also reissued in this series.