Thaddeus Abazie-Fitchett, Who Argued The Reading For Forty-One Years, Dies At 88
He published nine pages in 1984 saying the disputed line was not a closing formula. The re-collation finished five weeks after his funeral agrees, on the same two signs. It was cited three times.
LINCOLN, England — The paper was nine pages long, it appeared in 1984 in a journal with a print run of about four hundred, and it was right.
Thaddeus Abazie-Fitchett, who died at home in Lincoln on 14 March, aged 88, argued in those nine pages that line 11 of the Ur III fragment this newspaper catalogues as PX-1207 is not a closing formula. He was answered by no one.
On 22 April, five weeks after his funeral, Dr. Ifeoma Achebe-Faurholt finished a four-year re-collation of the fragment against the object rather than against the hand copy published in 1931, and reached his conclusion, in his terms, on his two signs.
She had not heard of him.
The nine pages
The formula and the line share a verb and share the determinative that follows it. Everything turns on the two signs between them.
Abazie-Fitchett's argument was that those two signs cannot carry the formula's reading, that the 1931 draughtsman had normalised them into shapes the tablet does not have, and that every collation since had been a collation of the drawing.
He set it out in seven paragraphs and a plate, with a photograph he had paid for himself.
The consequence, which he stated once and never repeated, is that line 11 is not boilerplate at the foot of a shortfall return. It is a finding, entered against a named party, by somebody who went and looked.
Dr. Achebe-Faurholt's sheets, published on 18 August, say the same thing in different notation. Nine days earlier this newspaper had printed the formula reading as settled.
The lectureship
He was born in Onitsha in November 1937, read classics at Ibadan, came to Britain in 1957 for a doctorate he finished in six years while working nights, and was appointed to a fixed-term lectureship at Hallamgate in 1972.
In 1991 the post was not renewed.
The committee minutes for that session are closed until 2035. This newspaper asked for them three times. The university's registrar has refused three times and her refusal is printed at the foot of this page, and it is the most useful document we obtained.
Three thousand one hundred tablets
He took a technician's grade at the Ravensholt Museum in Lincoln in 1992 and stayed twenty years.
Nobody asked him to catalogue the tablet collection. It had come in with a wool merchant's bequest in 1897 and had been described in the accession register as "sundry clay, Mesopotamian" for ninety-five years.
He finished in 2011: 3,100 entries, each with measurements, a condition note and a hand copy.
Eleven of those tablets are in the corpus Dr. Achebe-Faurholt collated.
The correspondence file
His daughter kept the ring binder. Fourteen letters to editors between 1985 and 2011; four replies.
Three are acknowledgements. The fourth is a refusal, courteous, on the grounds that the journal printed correspondence only about papers it had itself published — and his paper had appeared elsewhere, which made his objection structurally unprintable in the only place it mattered.
The single citation of the paper not written by Abazie-Fitchett is in PX-1908, §4, note 61. It reads: contra Abazie-Fitchett (1984), whose collation I have not seen.
The man
He married Enid Thackray, a primary school teacher, in 1963; she died in 2019. He grew onions, badly. He sang second bass in a chapel choir for thirty-one years and told nobody there what he did.
Dr. Rasheeda Gallowglass-Umeh, who was taught by him between 1987 and 1990 and is now a lecturer in Akkadian, says he ran a Thursday sign-drill in his own room, unpaid and off the timetable, and made his students copy from photographs and never from a published hand copy.
"I thought it was a quirk," she says. "It was the whole argument. He was teaching us the thing he could not get printed."
He is survived by his daughter Chiamaka and his son Alan, four grandchildren, and a catalogue eleven people have used.
What his daughter says
Chiamaka Abazie-Fitchett is not consoled by any of this and asked that we not write as though she were.
"The discipline did not suppress him," she says. "That would at least have been a decision. It declined to read him for forty-one years, which took no decision at all and no meeting and nobody's signature."
She is angrier with this newspaper than with the university. We printed his argument in 2019 as a reader's letter, four hundred words under a standing heading, and did not ring him. He was alive, in Lincoln, in the telephone book, for another seven years.
"You had him," she says. "You had him in your own pages and you filed him under correspondence."
What is still shut
The minutes. Nine more years, or fewer if the registrar's letter to her governing body succeeds.
He read the 1998 concordance the year it came out. His daughter found his copy on the shelf, and note 61 is marked in the margin with a single pencil line and nothing else.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
We read the 1984 paper against Dr. Achebe-Faurholt's collation sheets for the two disputed signs, line by line, with both authors' workings side by side. We counted the citations in three bibliographic databases searched separately rather than in one. The correspondence file was given to us entire by the family, unsorted, and is quoted here with their permission and without omission of the letters that do him no favours.
Who we spoke to
- Chiamaka Abazie-Fitchett, His daughter; structural engineer, Leeds. Interviewed in person at the family house in Lincoln twice, and by telephone four times; gave us the correspondence file June–August 2026 Read this obituary in draft at her request and asked for one change, which we made: her father's first degree was in classics, not in Semitics.
- Dr. Ifeoma Achebe-Faurholt, Assyriologist; completed the four-year re-collation. Interviewed by video call three times; supplied her collation sheets and her working notes for the two disputed signs July and August 2026 Found the 1984 paper in September 2025, after her collation of the line was complete. Her published sheets open with his name.
- Dr. Rasheeda Gallowglass-Umeh, Lecturer in Akkadian; taught by him at Hallamgate, 1987–90. Interviewed by telephone; produced her undergraduate notebooks July 2026 One of nine former students who wrote to the family. Six of the nine are still in the field.
- Ivo Brandreth-Kalu, Keeper of archaeology, the Ravensholt Museum, Lincoln. Interviewed in the store; showed us the accession registers, the catalogue and twenty years of his grade and salary records July 2026 Confirms the catalogue was never commissioned, never funded and never counted as part of the post.
- Prof. Iolanthe Bracegirdle-Osei, Registrar, Hallamgate University. Written request for the 1990–91 committee minutes, three times, once with a redaction schedule we drafted; replied in writing after twenty-six days August 2026 Declined to release the minutes. Her reply is printed in full and unedited under Right of Reply.
Documents
- PX-1908 — Adeleke-Sørvaag, concordance of Ur III administrative closing formulae (1998), §4 accepted
What we could not confirm
- Why the 1991 post was not renewed. The appointments and establishment committee minutes for that session are closed until 2035. We asked three times, offered a redaction schedule, and were refused three times. We have applied to the information commissioner; the family has decided not to. Nine years is the door, and it is still shut.
- Whether anyone read the paper between 1984 and 2025. The journal's referee report of 1985 may survive: its pre-1990 correspondence was transferred to a university archive on the journal's move in 1994 and cannot presently be located, which is not the same as destroyed. Two boxes are listed in a 1994 transfer note and are not on the shelf.
- Whether his catalogue is why eleven of his tablets are in the collation corpus. Dr. Achebe-Faurholt says she selected from the museum's shelf-list and had not seen the catalogue. Mr. Brandreth-Kalu says the shelf-list was rekeyed from the catalogue in 2014. Both may be right and we could not establish which record she was actually reading.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphSacked For Being Right: The Scholar They Silenced For Forty-One Years
Wrote the non-renewal as a firing and the firing as a punishment for the 1984 paper.
Had that we did not
The citation count, correctly, and the date the collation was finished.
Left out
That he was not sacked, that a fixed-term post was not renewed, and that the only document that would show why is sealed until 2035 — a fact their piece does not contain.
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ApertureThe Long Room: On Being Early
A four-thousand-word essay on obscurity, patience and the consolations of small work.
Had that we did not
Three of his letters, quoted at length and very well, with the family's permission.
Left out
The catalogue. Three thousand one hundred tablets appear in their essay as a metaphor for endurance and never as a finding aid that eleven people have since used.
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They Buriedthis newspaperThaddeus Abazie-Fitchett, Who Argued The Reading For Forty-One Years, Dies At 88
Read the 1984 paper against the 2026 collation sheets, counted the citations, and asked the university for the minutes.
Had that we did not
The argument in his own terms, the correspondence file entire, and the university's refusal printed at full length.
Left out
We ran his argument as a reader's letter on 6 April 2019, under 'From our correspondence', and did not follow it up. On 9 August this year we printed the reading he disputed as settled. This obituary is the first time his name has appeared in this newspaper above the fold, and he is not here to see the size of the type. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Prof. Iolanthe Bracegirdle-Osei, Registrar, Hallamgate University in writing on 21 July 2026, and again on 30 July and 11 August, with the relevant passages of the draft and a redaction schedule drawn up by this newspaper's lawyers. Replied 16 August 2026, declining to release the minutes. Printed in full and unedited, including the parts that are not helpful to the university.
I am sorry for the family's loss, and I want to begin with something this university has not been asked to say and should have said long ago: it is not our position that Dr Abazie-Fitchett was wrong. It never was. A committee that does not renew a fixed-term lectureship is not making a finding about a person's scholarship, and no such finding was made.
The minutes of the appointments and establishment committee for the 1990–91 session are closed until 2035. You have asked three times, once with a redaction schedule your own lawyers drafted, and I have declined three times. I would rather set out why properly than hide behind the word policy.
The closure period was thirty-five years when those minutes were written, which would have opened them this July. It was extended by nine in 2003, in a general revision applied to every committee of that class, for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with this file, which nobody was looking at and nobody had asked for. I understand exactly how that reads in a newspaper. It reads as though something was buried in 2003. Nothing was buried in 2003. A retention schedule was harmonised, and a man who had already lost his post twelve years earlier acquired another nine years of silence he did not ask for and never knew about. He died four months short of the date the original schedule would have given him.
Our retention register describes the file as containing material relating to a member of staff's professional conduct. You have quoted that phrase back to me in your draft and I can see what it will do to a reader, so let me take it apart rather than leave it standing. It is a category label. It is the label the register applies to every establishment file of that period, including the great majority in which nothing adverse appears at all. No complaint was made against Dr Abazie-Fitchett. No complaint was upheld. No disciplinary process of any kind was begun. I would rather tell you that than allow six words in a register to be the last thing anybody says about him, and I am aware that telling you confirms the file exists, which I am content to do.
On your central question I will not give you what you want. You want me to say whether the 1984 paper was a factor. I do not know. I was eleven years old. Of the five people who sat on that committee three are dead and two will not speak to me, and the only record of what they thought is the record I am not permitted to open. If I told you it played no part I would be guessing in the university's favour, you would print it, and my guess would become the answer for the next nine years.
What I will say is this. Nine years is a very long time to ask a family to wait for a document about a man who is already dead. I have written to the governing body asking whether the 1990–91 session may be released early on compassionate grounds. That request may well fail. I have made it in writing so that if it fails, there is a record of its failing.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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Readers' Letters 0
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