The two volumes of rock-drawings from southern Upper Egypt collected by Dr H. A. Winkler, and published by the Egypt Exploration Society, together form a work of the utmost interest and importance to all interested in the archaeology and ethnology of North Africa. In the first volume, published in 1938, Dr Winkler included a selection of the material collected from the deserts east of the Nile and from the Nile valley itself. In the second volume, just published, the drawings and paintings are all from the deserts west of the Nile and cover three main regions : first the edges of the Nile valley itself from Qena to Aswan ; secondly the regions between the Nile and Kharga; and thirdly certain parts of the central Libyan Desert towards the extreme south-western frontiers of Egypt, in particular the mountain ‘ desert oasis ’ of Gebel ’Uweinat.

The incident of the theft of the relics of Saint Petroc from his shrine in Bodmin priory church by a canon of Bodmin in 1177, their removal to the abbey of St.-Méen in Brittany, and their subsequent restoration owing to the vigorous action of Henry 11, is well-known. It is briefly referred to by the chroniclers Roger of Hoveden and Benedict of Peterborough. The long Vita Petroci in the newly discovered Gotha MS.; however, contains a full and detailed account of the whole affair by a contemporary writer of considerable literarypowers. It abounds in lifelike touches, and is one of the most interesting glimpses into the social life of the Middle Ages which we possess. It is here printed for the first time.

Transjordanien: voregneschichtliche Forschungen, edited by Hans Rhotert, with contributions by Prof. Franz M. Th. Böhl and Dr K. Willman. pp. XII, 251, 63 photographs, 294 line-drawings and 3 maps. Verlag Strecker und Schröder, Stuttgart, 1938.

During December 1932, a joint expedition of the Transjordan Department of Antiquities, and the American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, under the direction of Mr and Mrs George Horsfield and the reviewer, undertook a trip of archaeological reconnaissance through the desert of eastern Transjordan from Mafrak to Kilwa. The existence of ruins at Kilwa was known to us, and they formed the ultimate objective of our journey. Gertrude Bell seems to have been the first European to have visited these ruins on her way to Hayil in 1914, merely recording the fact in her Letters. We were able to establish the fact that the buildings there belonged to a Christian community of c. A.D. 1000. They housed a monastic settlement, marked also by numerous small cells in the vicinity of the main buildings, which existed in the midst of a Moslem world. The early Christian settlement at Kilwa was well situated.

In the long history of Minoan civilization two great catastrophes are discernible, of which the famous Cretan palaces themselves provide the chief source of our knowledge. Everywhere the catastrophes are seen to be contemporaneous. We can distinguish a period of the first palaces (MM) and a subsequent period of the second palaces (LM). There is no perceptible break in the development of the civilization as a result of these catastrophes. For this reason, the theories that the palaces were overthrown by invaders from abroad aroused opposition from the first. Usually the Achaeans—and even the Hyksos—were suggested as the destroyers. By this theory, however, it was not possible to explain two facts : the decorative arts continue on their way undisturbed, and the second palaces are built at once on the ruins of the first and are still unfortified. The Cretans would not have been so foolish as gratuitously to provide easy loot for fresh invaders.

In 1927 Professor Waterman of the University of Michigan undertook a special study of Babylonian topography for the purpose of locating the site of Opis (Babylonian Upi, Upa) the older Sumerian Akshak, capital of one of the oldest kingdoms in Mesopotamia. The general location of Opis is well defined by the inscriptions of Nebuchadrezzar at Wadi Brissa and Nahr el-Kelb, who states that for the defence of Babylon he built a wall from Sippar on the Euphrates to ‘ above ’ Opis on the Tigris, a distance of five beru, about twenty miles. Since with the help of this brick-faced earth wall he fashioned great bodies of water ‘ like the sea ’, twenty beru in length (probably in circumference), it is clear that a watercourse formed part of this system of defence. Xenophon mentions Opis as located above the modern Bagdad, but Strabo clearly places it in the district of the later Seleucia, stating2 that the Tigris was navigable as far as Opis and Seleucia.