Roger Moorey

Roger Moorey served his National Service in Cyprus and went on to found the journal Levant. Born Peter Roger Stuart Moorey on 30 May 1937, he read history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, after the posting¹. Thomas Kiely, writing on British archaeology in Cyprus, says that like many of his generation he did military service on the island in the 1950s and seems to have been inspired by its antiquities².

He joined the Ashmolean Museum in 1961 as Assistant Keeper of Antiquities, became Senior Assistant Keeper in 1973 and Keeper of Antiquities in 1983¹. His obituary has him retiring in 2002; Kiely dates his keepership 1983 to 2003^1,2. For a time he was responsible for the care of the museum's Cyprus gallery². His own research lay in the Near East, including the Luristan bronzes, much of it from Ashmolean collections, and with Hector W. Catling he produced the 1966 exhibition catalogue of the Persian bronzes given to the museum by James Bomford^1,5.

In 1968 he founded the journal Levant and edited it until 1986; Kiely calls it an important platform for the study of ancient Cyprus^1,2. He also supervised Oxford theses on Cypriot subjects. With John Boardman he co-supervised the doctorate of A. T. Reyes, begun in autumn 1986 and submitted in 1989, which led to Archaic Cyprus (1994)³. He also supervised Nicola Schreiber's thesis on Cypro-Phoenician pottery, published in 2003².

He was elected FBA in 1977 and served as President of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem from 1991 to 1999¹. He died on 23 December 2004¹.