Mr. Sidney Smith

Abstract

MR. SIDNEY SMITH, whose appointment to the recently instituted chair of Near Eastern Archæology in the University of London (Institute of Archæology) is announced (p. 806), has been keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum (Bloomsbury) since 1930, when he succeeded the late Dr. H. R. Hall. Mr. Smith was educated at the City of London School and Queens' College, Cambridge, of which he was a scholar and is now an honorary fellow. He took the Classical Tripos in 1911, and proceeded to Berlin for further study in 1912. In 1914 he was appointed an assistant in the British Museum ; but during the Great War he was commissioned in the Middlesex Regiment, and while on active service was mentioned in dispatches. On his return to the British Museum he continued his studies of cuneiform texts, and between 1921 and 1927 published a number of volumes of texts from Cappadocia, as well as from the Babylonian historical records. In 1921 he also published an account of the first campaign of Sannaeherib. Mr. Smith was a member of the British Museum's expedition excavating at Ur in 1922-23 ; and in 1929-30 he served as director of antiquities in Iraq. Among much other work, Mr. Smith has contributed to the Cambridge Ancient History, and initiated and edited Iraq, the publication of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Since 1923 he has been lecturer in Assyriology at King's College, London.