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Roger Moorey, formerly Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and widely regarded as the leading scholar of Near Eastern archaeology of his generation, died on 23 December 2004 at the age of 67. Following an era of discovery and research dominated by the excavators of the major sites, he brought an intellectual nimbleness and breadth of scholarship that set new benchmarks of balance, rigour and interpretive sophistication. His range and depth of knowledge were legendary. In a career based entirely in the Ashmolean Museum, he made seminal contributions to the understanding of many aspects of ancient material culture across the Near East: from Egypt and the Levant through Syria and Mesopotamia to Iran, and from the prehistoric to Achaemenian periods. The cogency, integrity and graciousness of his scholarship (one looks in vain for a mean-spirited put-down) were reflections of a mind that compromised none of its incisiveness for being, as he once said, "appreciative rather than critical"; and his natural collegiality cut across the divides of contemporary Middle Eastern politics. At once a specialist in many things and a generalist of rare breadth and insight, he was for a generation of colleagues and students an inspiring example of the "compleat scholar". Although his excavation experience was limited, Moorey's approach to understanding ancient cultures was always founded very firmly on direct scrutiny of the material remains, supplemented by innovative use of scientific analysis and close attention to the historical and other textual evidence. He was not inclined to abstract theorizing but read widely and was sensitive to new methodologies without being captive to intellectual fashion. His publications (some seventeen books, over ninety articles and seventy reviews) ranged from excavation reports and catalogues of particular corpora to broad synthetic studies, as well as some of the clearest and most useful works of popularization. 1 Much of his work quickly acquired the status of standard references and established new starting points for future research. For those of us based in Oxford, his regular presence in the Griffith Institute library was an object lesson in the commitment and focus that lies behind scholarship at the highest level. And for Near Eastern scholars who came to Oxford from around the world, his hospitality and generosity with his time and knowledge were a constant source of astonishment.