J. Theodore Bent

J. Theodore Bent (1852–1897) was an English explorer, archaeologist and travel writer. Born in Yorkshire and educated at Oxford, he married Mabel Hall-Dare in 1877, and the two traveled together for twenty years, she keeping the diaries and taking the photographs. They explored the Cyclades, described in The Cyclades, or Life among the Insular Greeks, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, which Bent wrongly attributed to ancient Arabian builders in The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, the Ethiopian highlands in The Sacred City of the Ethiopians, and southern Arabia, Socotra and the Persian Gulf. He died in London of malaria caught in Arabia, and Mabel Bent finished Southern Arabia from their notes.