Peter Roger Stuart Moorey, Archaeologist

Died: 23 December, 2004, in Oxford, aged 67.

ROGER Moorey, as everyone knew him, was one of the leading British Near Eastern archaeologists, and at the same time, the most modest of men.

After Mill Hill School, in north London he began national service in 1956, with the Army Intelligence Corps in Cyprus. It was there that he developed a fascination for archaeology, particularly the archaeology of the complex international world of the early Near Eastern civilisations.

He returned to study modern history at Oxford, graduating in 1961. He was then promptly appointed an assistant keeper in the department of antiquities of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. He was to spend his whole career there, retiring as keeper in 2002, having spent 20 years as a senior manager.

Roger was persuaded to serve as the vicegerent of Wolfson College for two years following his retirement. Sadly, he fell ill just as that term was ending, and he had no opportunity to engage in leisured research and the writing of several planned books.

Alongside his curatorial duties at the Ashmolean, Roger managed to complete a doctorate, and follow that with a series of publications of the highest international scholarly significance. At the Ashmolean, he was responsible for collections from the entire Near and Middle East, then including Egypt. His subjects ranged from the fourth through to the first millennia BC. He wrote about the palatial architecture of Sumer, Iraq’s earliest urban civilisation, and catalogued the Ashmolean’s Luristan bronzes from ancient Iran. More recently, he published a magnum opus, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries, and a major work on clay figurines from the ancient Near East.

For Ashmolean Museum visitors, he wrote jewel-like introductory booklets, and, for the wider public, intelligent, balanced and readable books on subjects, such as the relationship between the Bible, history and archaeology. He also found time to play key roles in the management of British archaeological research throughout the Near East. From 1976 he was an active Fellow of Wolfson College.

At the age of 40, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. For many years he also served on the councils of management of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the British Institute of Persian Studies and the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History. For most of the 1990s, he was president of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. He was also the founding editor of the academic journal Levant. In Oxford, he supervised the doctoral studies of young researchers. When the university established an undergraduate degree in archaeology and anthropology in 1993, he undertook to tutor and lecture in Near Eastern archaeology.

Only now that he is gone, when we try to recollect what he did and how much he achieved, does it become clear that he managed to combine the equivalent of at least three normal jobs, while all the time seeming completely unflappable and totally focused, whether answering enquiries, responding to correspondents, or just chatting over a pub lunch.

Whether he was the host of a distinguished colleague from abroad, or the external examiner discussing an MA dissertation with an Edinburgh undergraduate, he showed the same courtesy, interest and kindness. He has left his mark on the shelves of libraries and on several British archaeological institutions, but above all on generations of scholars and archaeologists around the world.