Dr. H. R. Hall, Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, died at his home in London yesterday at the age of 57.
Born on September 30, 1873, the son of the late Mr. Sydney Hall, M.V.O, the painter, Harry Reginald Holland Hall followed his father to Merchant Taylors' School in 1886. He left in 1891, having obtained an open scholarship for modern history at St. John's College, Oxford, and took his degree in 1895 with a second class in Lit. Hum. In the following year he joined the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, and was promoted to Assistant Keeper in 1919 and Keeper in 1924.
Hall's first excavation were at Dair-al-Bahari, 1903-7, and at Abydos, 1910, with Professor Naville, for the Egypt Exploration Fund; he also took part in the Egypt Exploration Society's excavations at Abudos in 1925. With Professor Naville he published a notable work on the Eleventh Dynasty Temple at Dair-al-Bahari, and with Naville and T.E. Peet one on the cemeteries of Abydos. In 1918 he directed the British Museum excavations at Ur of the Chaldees. Tell al-'Ubaid, and Abu Shahrain. The first volume of "Ur Excavations," by Hall and C. L. Woolley, assisted by Sir Arthur Keith and C. J. Gadd, appeared in 1927. This magnificent book, amply illustrated, describes the results obtained by the joint expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in a mound named Al-'Ubaid. There Hall discovered large copper lions and bulls, dating to the beginning of the third millennium, , and a great copper relief of Im-dugud, the mythical bird of the god Ningirsu. Mr. Woolley has described in recent articles in The Times the further important discoveries at Ur. Another work by Hall on his explorations at Ur in 1919 has just issued.
Dr. Hall was essentially a historian rather than a field archaeologist or a philologist, and his "Ancient History of the Near East," which went into seven editions, combined a general authority among expert students of Eastern archaeology with a wide popularity as a University text-book. The scheme of chronology he adopted for Egyptian history and the more easterly civilizations with which it was linked, was a compromise between that of Professor Breasted and the advanced school of German scholars and that held by the older English Egyptologists represented by Sir Flinders Petrie and Sir E. Wallis Budge. Apart from his work as an all-round Egyptologist he was a foremost authority on the history of Babylonia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia, and his knowledge of the Aegean civilizations, particularly the cultures known as Minoan, was second only to that of Sir Arthur Evans. His earliest interest, as it happens, was in Greece, on which he published his first book in 1901, and his last, the Rhind lectures delivered in Edinburgh on the "The Civilization of Greece in the Bronze Age," originally published in 1923 and reissued with new material two years ago. He was known to remark that the great thing about Greek civilization was that it did not leave room for "Pyramid-lunatics" — there was something about it which discourage that kind of thing.