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- James Theodore Bent
- Also known as
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James Theodore Bent
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primary name: Bent, James Theodore
- Details
- individual; archaeologist; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1852-1897
- Biography
- Explorer and archaeologist. Bent was a trained classicist and his portrait exhibited in the British Museum as part of an exhibition on the archaic art of the Cyclades. He and his wife engaged in archaeological research on the coast of Asia Minor (1888-89), Bahrain (1889), Cilicia Trachia (1890), Mashonaland (now in Zimbabwe; 1891), Ethiopia (1893), and the Arabian peninsula (1893-97), where he mapped the Hadramawt region. Bent and his wife were suspected by the French authorities in Tehran to be acting as agents of the British Museum when they visited Iran in 1889.
Author of: "The Bahrain Islands in the Persian Gulf", 'Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society' vol. XCC (1890), pp. 1-19; 'The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland' (London 1892); 'The Sacred City of the Ethiopians' (London 1893); 'Southern Arabia' (London 1900). Some papers relevant to their Greek work are held in the Dept of Greek & Roman Antiquities but there is no equivalent filed correspondence in the Dept of the Middle East from either of the Bents for the period 1887-1898 inclusive.
Donor to the BM of the collections (omitting many smaller gifts):
1884,1213.1 to 73 from the Cyclades
1886,0310.1 to 22 from Greece
1888,1003.1 to 33 eastern Greece
As1889,1213. from Bahrain
Af1892,0714.1 to 193 from Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)
Af1893,0715.1 to 73 from Ethiopia
- Bibliography
- Brisch, G. (ed), 2006, The travel chronicles of Mrs J. Theodore Bent. Volume I: World enough, and time. Greece and the Levantine Littoral. Mabel Bent's diaries of 1883-1898, from the Joint Library of the Hellenic and Roman Societies, London (Oxford: Archaeopress).
Nicole Chevalier, 'La recherche archéologique française au moyen-orient 1842-1947', Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 2002, pp. 128-29.
Fitton, J.L. 1989/1999, Cycladic art (London: British Museum Press), 7-9 (2nd ed.).
Fitton, J.L. 1998, The discovery of the Greek Bronze Age (London: British Museum Press), 106-107.
Very extensive coverage of Theodore and Mabel Bent in the website: http:// tambent.com/
Digitised versions of the Bents' notebooks and travelogues can be found here: https:// sas-space.sas.ac.uk/view/collections/CCL.html#group_B
J Theodore Bent, ‘The tribes of Mashonaland and their origin', in the ‘Scottish Geographical Magazine’, Volume 8, 1892, pp.534-539.
J.Theodore Bent & Robert McNair Wilson Swan, ‘The ruined cities of Mashonaland’, 1893