C. Leonard Woolley (1880–1960)

Charles Leonard Woolley was born in the London borough of Hackney. He was educated at St. John's School and Oxford University, where he decided to become an archeologist. In 1905, he became assistant keeper (curator) of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. He began his archeological career the following year. Woolley's pioneering discoveries and scholarship became the basis of our modern understanding of Mesopotamian civilization, and made him world-famous. In 1930, he published Ur of the Chaldees, which became the best-selling book on an archaeological subject. He was knighted in 1935.