Richard "Dick" Hope Simpson (1930–2016) was a British Classical archaeologist, known for his work in archaeological survey and the study of Mycenaean Greece. For most of his career, he taught at Queen's University at Kingston in Kingston, Ontario.
A leading figure in Greek field survey throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Hope Simpson played a major role in the University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition and in the production of several of the key gazetteers of Mycenaean civilisation in Greece. His work was significant in allowing an understanding of Mycenaean states, particularly in Messenia, beyond the relatively small number of large, well-known and excavated sites. In the 1960s, his projects pioneered new methods of extensive survey, including the use of remote sensing via aerial photography.
Hope Simpson believed in the essential historicity of the Homeric epics and produced several works, including his doctoral thesis, attempting to locate the toponyms of the Iliad with the archaeological sites known from Mycenaean Greece. The archaeologist Sinclair Hood described him as "an apostle of Common Sense".
Early life and education
Hope Simpson was born on 12 May 1930, the middle of three brothers. His father, Dr. John Whitwell Hope Simpson, was a GP. He was a distant relative of Sir John Hope Simpson, the civil servant, MP and diplomat.
He studied literae humaniores (Classics) at St John's College in the University of Oxford, matriculating in 1950. After graduating, he remained at Oxford for the 1954–1955 academic year to pursue a Diploma in Classical Archaeology. His tutor was Dorothea Gray, to whom he later credited his interest in Greek prehistory, and with whom he would undertake some of his early survey work in Greece.
While at Oxford, he attended the British School at Athens' undergraduate summer course, where he met then-director Sinclair Hood. He continued to the University of London to study for his Ph.D. From 1956 to 1958, he returned to the British School at Athens on a School Studentship. He submitted his thesis, The topography of Mycenaean Greece in relation to the Achaean section of the Homeric Catalogue of the Ships, in November 1962.
Academic career
Early career: 1956–1960
In 1959, Hope Simpson was awarded the first Michael Ventris Memorial Award for Mycenaean Studies, given by the Institute of Classical Studies to promising young scholars in the field of Mycenaean or Minoan studies. He was most known and prolific in the field of archaeological survey, and his many contributions to large-scale landscape surveys of Mycenaean sites. In the spring of 1957, while still a doctoral student, he had completed a survey of the Spercheios Valley in Phthiotis in central Greece, alongside his frequent collaborator John Lazenby.
Between 1956 and 1958, he made an extensive survey of Laconia, including the islands of Kythera and Antikythera, alongside Helen Waterhouse and at the encouragement of Alan Wace. Like most of his future survey work, the expedition consisted largely of the collection and cataloguing of surface finds, with the view to identifying and mapping sites of Mycenaean habitation. The Laconia survey significantly increased the number of known Mycenaean sites in the region, and remained widely cited into the 21st century. In the spring of 1956–7, he spent seven weeks surveying in south-eastern Messenia, with the assistance of David French, and later published his work as 'Identifying a Mycenaean State', in which he linked his discoveries with the 'Seven Cities' promised to Achilles by Agamemnon in the Iliad. His belief in the essential correspondence between the place-names of the Homeric poems and the geography of the Mycenaean period led him to write, with John Lazenby, The Catalogue of Ships in Homer's Iliad, which attempted to match the places named in the Iliad with those known from archaeological survey. Contemporary reviews, however, questioned the value of the Catalogue as an historical document, pointing to its essentially poetic nature as well as its composition over many centuries, and most modern scholars consider the attempt to find archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Homeric poems to be fundamentally misguided.
Between 1960 and 1970, Hope Simpson and Lazenby worked together on a further survey of the Dodecanese.