Artefacts of Excavation

British orientalist; he was born in Bodicote, Oxfordshire, 6 Nov. 1911, son of Thomas William T. and Edith Maud Clarke; he was educated at the City of Oxford School and St Catherine’s College, Oxford; BA, 1933; he studied at Berlin University, 1933-6 and took part in the excavation of El-Amarna, 1935; Senior Student, Oxford, 1935-7; Mark Quested Exhibitioner, Oxford, 1937-9; he was appointed assistant lecturer in Semitic Languages, University College of N. Wales Bangor, 1937 and then became reader in Hebrew, University of Durham, 1938-45 except for 1940-5 when he served in the Foreign Office; Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages, Durham, 1945-51; in 1951 he became the first Director of the School of Oriental Studies at Durham as well as Professor of Semitic Philology until his retirement in 1977; his main contribution to Egyptian philology was The Relationship of the Semitic and Egyptian Verbal System, 1954; he died in Durham, 23 April 1984.