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Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and was educated at Eton and Oxford. In 1930 Thesiger returned to Africa at the invitation of Emperor Haile Selassie and returned again in 1933 to lead an expedition to explore the course of the Awash river. Between 1935-1940 he served in the Sudan Political Service and joined the Sudan Defence Force to serve in World War Two. After the Second World War, Thesiger travelled across Arabia including two crossings of the great Arabian desert, the Rub' al Khali or Empty Quarter, and travels in inner Oman. He lived for some years in the marshes of Iraq, and then travelled in Iran, Kurdistan, French West Africa and Pakistan. He lived for many years in northern Kenya. Thesiger returned to England in the 1990s and was knighted in 1995.

Stephen Helmsley Longrigg was born in Sevenoaks, Kent, and educated at Highgate School and Oriel College, Oxford. He served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in the First World War before returning to Oxford to complete his Masters degree. He then joined the British Administration in Iraq and served as Inspector-General of Revenue between 1927 and 1931. It was during this time that he wrote "Four Centuries of Modern Iraq" (1925), a history of Iraq under the Ottoman Empire. In 1937 he joined the Iraq Petroleum Company in which he continued to work until his retirement in 1951, apart from serving in the Army in the Middle East during World War Two. He was an able linguist which a good knowledge of tribal affairs. He wrote widely about his time in the Middle East.

Nora Elisabeth Mary Boyce was born in India in 1920. She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge with a double first. She joined the faculty of the Royal Holloway College, University of London in 1944, where she taught Anglo-Saxon literature and archaeology until 1946. Simultaneously she continued her studies, this time in Persian languages, under the guidance of Vladimir Minorsky at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 1945 to 1947. There she met Walter Bruno Henning, under whose tutelage she began to study Middle Iranian languages. In 1948, Boyce was appointed lecturer of Iranian Studies at SOAS, specialising in Manichaean, Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Parthian texts. In 1952, she was awarded a doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge. At SOAS, she was promoted to Reader (1958–1961) and subsequently awarded the University of London's professorship in Iranian Studies following Henning's transfer to the University of California at Berkeley. Boyce remained professor at SOAS until her retirement in 1982, continuing as Professor Emerita and a professorial research associate until her death in 2006. Her speciality remained the religions of speakers of Eastern Iranian languages, in particular Manichaeanism and Zoroastrianism.