Professor Emeritus Seton Howard Frederick Lloyd, C.B.E., A.R.I.B.A., F.B.A.

Seton Lloyd was born in Birmingham on 30 May 1902. After school at Uppingham, he studied at the Architectural Association in London and qualified as an architect in 1926, when he joined Sir Edwin Lutyens' practice in Queen Anne's Gate. In 1928 Lloyd set up in practice with two friends and this unexpectedly gave him his entry into archaeology and led to a distinguished career as a Near Eastern field archaeologist and professor. One of his partners was due to join an excavation in his professional capacity as architect/surveyor but last-minute developments necessitated his remaining in London to oversee the partnership's first important commission. Lloyd went in his place and found himself at Tell el-Amarnah, the fourteenth-century B.C. site which Henri Frankfort was excavating for the Egypt Exploration Society. This project lasted for two years, and in 1930 Lloyd was invited by Frankfort to join his next excavation, under the auspices of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, of a series of sites in the Diyala region north-east of Baghdad, which occupied them for seven years. From 1937-9 Lloyd excavated at Mersin, in southern Turkey, for the University of Liverpool and returned to Iraq in 1939 as technical adviser to the Director of Antiquities in Baghdad. During the war he worked briefly in the public relations office of the Mandate government in Jerusalem but returned to Baghdad in 1941, where he helped to establish the Iraq Museum and reorganize the Gertrude Bell Museum. He trained Iraqi archaeologists and participated with Iraqi colleagues in several major excavations, notably at Eridu, the most important post-diluvian city in Babylon. In 1949 Lloyd was appointed director of the new British School of Archaeology in Ankara and was immediately faced with formidable difficulties over the basic preliminaries of finding and equipping modest premises and starting a library. He excavated with, among others, James Mellaart, F.S.A., one of the first scholars at the Ankara School, the mound at Beycesultan, in western Anatolia, which revealed the remains of a series of Bronze Age palaces of the Arzawan culture which flourished at the time of Homeric Troy. A brief spell of retirement from Ankara in 1961 was followed by election to the chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at London University in 1962, in succession to Sir Max Mallowan, F.S.A., and he remained there until 1969. Lloyd continued his fieldwork: in eastern Turkey in 1965 he studied Urartu, the culturally advanced state centred on Lake Van which flourished during the ninth-seventh centuries B.C.; and in Iraq in 1966 he noted with satisfaction that local archaeologists were conducting major digs. He served as a Vice-President of the Society from 1965-9 and received the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal in 1971 and the Gertrude Bell Memorial Medal in 1979. He published profusely from 1935 onwards when Sennacherib's Aqueduct at Jerwan was published by Chicago, through the 1940s, 50s and 60s when perhaps his best known book, Art of the Ancient Near East (1961) appeared, to the late 1980s when, at the age of eighty-seven, he published Ancient Turkey. He died on 8 January 1996.