Reginald Campbell Thompson

British archaeologist (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.

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, and educated at Colet Court, St Paul's School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read oriental (Hebrew and Aramaic) languages. In 1904 he found the remains of the temple of Nabu in Nineveh, 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. 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. 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".