The main object of these articles is to examine the evidence on the subject of Pyramids in general and the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) in particular; and to see if a reasonable conclusion can be reached as to the purpose for which the Great Pyramid was erected.

There have been few tendencies in the history of English culture with so profound a contemporary influence as the so-called Romantic Movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and still fewer with such a strangely assorted progeny. That toying with ‘the Gothick’, which produced such early jeux d'esprit as Walpole's Strawberry Hill or Beckford's Fonthill, led, on the one hand, to the Albert Memorial, and, on the other, to the sculpture of Eric Gill; in literature, while the Romantics founded an honourable poetic tradition extending from Collins through Wordsworth to Blunden, it is surely not fantastic to see in such works as Lewis' Bravo of Venice the genesis of the modern thriller. Most strange of all, one outcome of the Romantic Movement was a new branch of science. For prehistoric archaeology in England was not the product of the classical lore so eagerly absorbed from Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries, but originated in those eccentric gentlemen of the 18th century who perambulated the countryside studying at first hand the antiquities of their own forefathers.

In the number of ANTIQUITY which appeared in March 1934 there was an article by Mr A. W. Clapham, the object of which was to show that the Irish art which is exemplified by the ‘Book of Durrow’ and the famous ‘Book of Kells’ seems to be derived from the Northumbrian art of which the Lindisfarne Book is an example. The popular tradition, at least of the last hundred years, goes the other way: the ‘Book of Kells’ is popularly regarded as not only very splendid, but also very Irish. The purpose of what follows is to test and illustrate these views by the evidence of textual criticism. Most of what I have to say will be dreary to the student of art, and crambe repetita to the Biblical critic, but I venture to persevere, because I cannot help feeling that the text does throw some light on the illustrations.

Despite the obvious analogies between the ancient and modern flint industries of Britain and the equally obvious gaps in the continuity of their evolution, neither archaeologists nor economic historians have stooped to elucidate the problems of what it has become a platitude to call ‘The World's Oldest Industry’. The flint-knapping industry still existing at Brandon for the production of gunflints has alone among the flint-knapping industries of Britain been described with any degree of adequacy. A bare record survives of the former existence of a score of similar industries but the majority is unrecognized and neglected. The student of the question today has as much cause to bemoan the paucity of data as did Beckmann, who wrote in 1814 ‘Many of my readers will perhaps be desirous to know in what manner our gunflints are prepared. Considering the great use made of them it will hardly be believed how much trouble I had to obtain information on the subject’. The magnitude of the dumps of waste products at Brandon at the close of the Napoleonic War provoked exclamations of wonder from contemporary topographers, but apparently the first to realize the interest and significance of the Brandon industry was Dr J. Mitchell, who in 1837 communicated his observations to the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. In 1870 James Wyatt, F.G.S., contributed a chapter on the subject to Stevens’ Flint Chips, but the classic account from which all subsequent articles derive is that by S. B. J. Skertchly, of H.M. Geological Survey.

Since the great International Conference held at Florence in 1928, when so many of the wider problems of Etruscan archaeology were discussed, there has been a general tendency, especially marked among the younger writers, to concentrate upon intensive studies of detail. The seven volumes of the admirable Studi Etruschi and, in a less degree, the annual publications of the foreign Schools and the Italian Academy are full of excellent monographs upon such matters as the sculpture, painting or pottery of a given period or place, or upon any other minor department of the whole far-reaching subject. These are of real value as contributing to build up the entire fabric, but they are naturally too specialized to have any appeal for the general archaeologist.

It does not seem to have been contested, and therefore one may assume that it is generally agreed, that the discovery of the remains of a sickle in an ancient deposit is evidence that its owner knew how to grow corn. The forms that sickles took prior to the use of metal have been ably classified by M. Vayson de Pradenne in an article which was reviewed and summarized in ANTIQUITY in June 1930, and as a result of his work the characteristics of the flint flakes and of their method of hafting as sickles has come to be widely known and easily recognized.

There is little room for doubt that the remains of ancient roads or causeways still to be seen in Yucatan are, so far as the history of the peninsula is concerned, of considerable antiquity. Two of the earliest and most important historians of Yucatan, namely, Diego de Landa and Bernardo de Lizana, mention them, and brief notices of their existence have been made by explorers in the nineteenth century. It seems highly probable that as early as a thousand years ago a broad highway extended a considerable distance across the northern part of the peninsula of Yucatan, if indeed it did not reach from the eastern to the western shores of the country.

When one speaks of tradition, that is to say, of the transmission of human knowledge from one generation to another, one implies that there are two methods by which that transmission is effected—the spoken and the written word; thus one draws a distinction between oral and written tradition.

Nowadays written tradition alone is of importance; but one recognizes that it has gradually replaced that oral tradition which alone existed, as one supposes, in prehistoric times. We wish here to call attention to yet another mode of transmission which certainly played a part, perhaps even an important part, in the Stone Ages, and disregard of which might in certain instances seriously confuse the study of prehistoric archaeology.

The Iraqi Government is proposing to supersede the Antiquities Law drawn up eleven years ago, and approved by the League of Nations, by one which will admittedly be far more onerous to the foreign excavator working in Iraq. As a prelude to the introduction of the bill before the Iraqi Parliament there has been a regular campaign of propaganda intended to show that under the existing law Iraq has been robbed, by concessions made to foreign missions, of the treasures which were legally and morally hers, and that Iraq never has had fair treatment and will not have it so long as the division of the objects from excavations is conducted by a foreign Director of Antiquities. To what lengths this campaign has been carried may be illustrated by the following: in March 1934 Abdal Rizaq Effendi, the Curator of the Baghdad Museum, personally repeated to me the statement, published in the local press, that the normal share accruing to the Baghdad Museum from the division of antiquities with a foreign mission, as conducted by the Director, was no more than one half of one per cent. of the objects catalogued.