We receive a constant stream of publications of archaeological societies, issued by national and provincial bodies in various countries, with requests to notice them in ANTIQUITY. Much as we should like to do so, it is not possible as a regular practice for all sorts of reasons, chiefly lack of space. Itre also receive many requests to exchange them for ANTIQUITY, and these too we are obliged to refuse; this is an obvious mutual convenience for societies which have libraries, but ANTIQUITY is not a society and we cannot pay the printer’s bill with anything but money. Nevertheless we try occasionally to make up by an omnibus notice, and this is one them. We can only hope that in this way some small assistance may be given to those whose ultimate objectives are, like ours, the advancement and diffusion of knowledge.

IRAQ, Vol. XV, part I, Spring 1953, is the organ of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (founded in memory of Gertrude Bell) and issued from 20 Wilton St., London. The first work is devoted to Professor Mallowan’s usual prompt and workmanlike account of his excavations, this time at Nimrud (Kalhou) in 1952. One of the ivories had a cruciform symbol which looks remarkably like a late survival of the (Cretan) ‘horns of consecration’ and double-axe. R. W. Hamilton publishes some fine Umayyad carved plaster of the 8th century from Khirbat a1 Mafjar in the Jordan valley, and deals generally with the origins, history and extent of this art, in which several different traditions converged to create a new and easily recognizable style. M. V. Seton Williams describes painted pottery made in parts of Turkey and North Syria between c. 1900 and c. 1550 B.C., some of which has Persian cognates. R. Maxwell-Hyslop writes about bronze lugged axe- or adze-blades, also called Trunnion Celts, for which an Anatolian origin early in the 2nd millennium is suggested. Later the type may have spread westwards and northwestwards through Mycenaean trade.