Background
He was born in Kensington, and educated at Colet Court, Saint Paul"s School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Oriental (Hebrew and Aramaic) Languages.
He was born in Kensington, and educated at Colet Court, Saint Paul"s School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Oriental (Hebrew and Aramaic) Languages.
He excavated at Nineveh, Ur, Nebo and Carchemish among many other sites. 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. She dedicated her story Lord Edgware Dies to "Doctor and Mistress
Campbell Thompson". He died in 1941 aged 64 while serving in the Home Guard River Patrol on the River Thames.