His brother, Arthur Roy Saggs, a sergeant in the RAF, died on 4 January 1945 in South Africa on a training flight, aged 20.
[2] Saggs was awarded his PhD degree in 1953 for his dissertation titled A study of city administration in Assyria and Babylonia in the period 705 to 539 B.C.
[4] His life's work, encouraged by Max Mallowan, was the publication of 243 letters found at the Nimrud archive of cuneiform tablets.
[2] In 1965, Saggs worked at Tell al-Rimah in northern Iraq, and published a business archive of tablets dating from Middle Assyrian.
Here he established good relations with Iraq's universities, inviting and training a series of Iraqi Assyriologists who then became influential in their own country.
[1] Following his retirement, Saggs remained active both academically and in his pursuit of Old Testament studies, becoming a lay reader at Roydon, near Harlow.