James Theodore Bent (30 March 1852 – 5 May 1897) was an English explorer, archaeologist, and author. Biography James Theodore Bent was born in Liverpool on 30 March 1852, the son of James (1807-1876) and Eleanor (née Lambert, c.1811-1873) Bent of Baildon House, Baildon, near Bradford, Yorkshire, where Bent lived in his boyhood. He was educated at Malvern Wells preparatory school, Repton School, and Wadham College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1875. His paternal grandparents were William (1769-1820) and Sarah (née Gorton) Bent; it was this William Bent who founded Bent's Breweries, a successful business which, in various guises, was still in existence into the 1970s, and which helped generate the family's wealth. One of Bent's uncles, Sir John Bent, the brewer, was Liverpool mayor in 1850–51. In 1877, Bent married Mabel Hall-Dare (1847-1929) who became his companion, photographer, and diarist on all his travels. From the time of their marriage, they went abroad nearly every year, beginning with extended travels in 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. The couple's researches in the Aegean archipelago over the winters of 1882/3 and 1883/4 culminated in Bent's The Cyclades; or, Life among the Insular Greeks (1885). At the time of Bent's death in 1897, the couple resided at 13 Great Cumberland Place, London, and Sutton Hall, outside Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK. Archaeological research From this period Bent concentrated particularly on archaeological and ethnographic research. The years 1883-1888 were devoted to investigations in the Eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia, his discoveries and conclusions being communicated to the Journal of Hellenic Studies and other magazines and reviews; his investigations on the Cycladic island of Antiparos are of note. In 1889, he undertook excavations in the Bahrein Islands of the Persian Gulf, looking for evidence that they had been a primitive home of the Phoenician civilization; he and his wife returned to England via Persia (Iran), being introduced to Shah Naser al-Din Shah Qajar along the way. 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