Otto Harkaman

Hello sounds fun you are running this, I have the main book but not the journal handouts. Seems many times people don't want to read a lot of text, perhaps you could break down the information to them as radio broadcasts they overhear or as articles they happen to see in the newspapers. As an aside Reginald Campbell Thompson is a very interesting person beside his being a British archaeologist, assyriologist, and cuneiformist. He worked for the British Intelligence service as a code breaker. Reginald Campbell Thompson represented a select breed of intelligence officer: the archaeologist. As a child he collected flints and bits of Persian pottery, and by his teens was translating ancient Assyrian texts from their original cuneiform script. The earliest known system of writing, cuneiform was made up of symbols carved into clay tablets. Developed by the Sumerians, it remained in use for thousands of years, growing in sophistication as it passed through the Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite civilisations. The art of reconstructing and deciphering cuneiform from archaeological fragments was the perfect training for work as a codebreaker. After studying Oriental languages at Cambridge, Thompson embarked on nearly 20 years of wandering the Middle East, moving from one excavation project to another, collecting and then recording his finds in a series of books that included trailblazing studies of the magic, demonology and astrology of the Babylonians. Clauson affectionately described him as a ‘curious old bird with a most amazing inverted brain’. Clearly Thompson had an unusual mind. He liked to visit the cinema because ‘he solved many of his hardest problems as he watched pictures floating across the screen’. But he was also a man of action; more Indiana Jones than Nutty Professor. He was a crack rifle shot and an accomplished sailor. He regarded exercise as a ‘moral obligation’. He had little patience with those lacking the physical toughness to endure the rigours of field work in harsh and hostile landscapes, believing a man should be able to withstand ‘heat and cold, hunger and thirst’. There is a lot more about him in, "The Codebreakers" by James Wyllie