St John Simpson

Assistant Keeper, Iran and Arabia

Ancient Iran and Arabia

Department: Middle East

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7323 8942
Email: ssimpson @ thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

Dr Simpson is the curator responsible for the pre-Islamic collections from Iran and Arabia in the British Museum. Star items in these collections include the Oxus Treasure, the Cyrus cylinder, Sasanian silver dishes, and antiquities from ancient South Arabia.

He has a D. Phil. on the archaeology of the Sasanian period in Mesopotamia and his main research field is Sasanian material culture. He has excavated extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia, including sites of all periods from prehistoric to recent times.

Current British Museum projects

Merv: publication of excavations 1992-2000

Cataloguing Ancient South Arabia

Previous British Museum projects

New gallery displays for ancient Iran and South Arabia

Exhibition: Queen of Sheba: Treasures from ancient Yemen (BM, 2002)

External fellowships/ honorary positions/ membership of professional bodies

Vice-chair and Joint Editor of Monograph Series, The Society for Arabian Studies

Chair, Bead Study Trust

Committee, Association for the History of Glass

Publications

Most recent publications

St J. Simpson, Excavations at Tell Abu Dhahir (Oxford: Archaeopress on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq & Department of Antiquities, Baghdad, 2007)

St J. Simpson, ‘The archaeology of the clay pipe in the Near East’, Al-Rafidan 30 (2009), 67-75.

St J. Simpson, ‘Suburb or slum? Excavations at Merv (Turkmenistan) and observations on stratigraphy, refuse and material culture in a Sasanian city’, Pp. 65-78 in Recent advances in Sasanian Archaeology and History (eds. D. Kennet & P. Luft). (Oxford 2008)

St J. Simpson, ‘Bushehr and beyond: some early archaeological discoveries in Iran’, Pp. 153-65 in From Persepolis to the Punjab: 19^th-century discoveries (eds. E. Errington and V.S. Curtis). (BMP 2007)

St J. Simpson, ‘A biographical sketch of Britain’s first Sabaeologist: Colonel W.F. Prideaux, CSI’, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 37 (2007), 201-18 [joint with C.S. Phillips].