James Theodore Bent

James Theodore Bent
James Theodore Bent
Born	30 March 1852 Baildon, Yorkshire
Died	5 May 1897 (1897-05-06) (aged 45) London
Nationality	English

James Theodore Bent (30 March 1852 – 5 May 1897) was an English explorer, archaeologist and author.

James Theodore Bent was the son of James Bent of Baildon House, near Bradford, Yorkshire, where he was born. He was educated at Repton School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1875. In 1877 he married Mabel, daughter of R. W. Hall-Dare of Newtownbarry, Co. Wexford, and she became his companion in all his travels. He went abroad every year and became thoroughly acquainted with Italy and Greece. In 1879 he published a book on the republic of San Marino, entitled A Freak of Freedom, and was made a citizen of San Marino; in the following year appeared Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell, and in 1881 a Life of Giuseppe Garibaldi. He spent considerable time in the Aegean archipelago, of which he wrote in The Cyclades; or, Life among the Insular Greeks (1885).

From this period Bent devoted himself particularly to archaeological research. The years 1885-1888 were given up to investigations in Asia Minor, his discoveries and conclusions being communicated to the Journal of Hellenic Studies and other magazines and reviews. In 1889 he undertook excavations in the Bahrein Islands of the Persian Gulf, and found evidence that they had been a primitive home of the Phoenician race. After an expedition in 1890 to Cilicia Trachea, where he obtained a valuable collection of inscriptions, Bent spent a year in South Africa, with the object, by investigation of some of the ruins in Mashonaland, of throwing light on the vexed question of their origin and on the early history of East Africa. He made the first detailed examination of the Great Zimbabwe. Bent described his work in The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892). In 1893 he investigated the ruins of Axum and other places in northern Ethiopia, which had previously made known in part by the researches of Henry Salt and others. His book The Sacred City of the Ethiopians (1893) gives an account of this expedition.