It is widely known that war-time air photography has led to the discovery of many new archaeological sites of importance in Mediterranean lands. Many hundreds of tumuli have been added to the list, at such famous Etruscan cemeteries as Cerveteri and Tarquinia and complete systems of Roman land-partition by Centuriation have been identified round the coloniae of Iader and Salonae, on the shores of Dalmatia. But by far the most notable discoveries of all are those on the Foggia Plain, in the Province of Apulia, in Southeast Italy. Great numbers of Prehistoric, Roman, and Medieval sites are being identified, and some preliminary results have already been published in ANTIQUITY(' Siticulosa Apulia ', December 1946). Select examples were exhibited at the Classical Conference at Oxford and at the British Association Meeting, in 1948, and again for several months this year, in the Ashmolean Museum. These were chosen from a number which it was fortunately possible to acquire for the University of Oxford, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum, where they are being studied in detail. This collection was based on vertical photographs taken by the Royal Air Force, and oblique photographs taken by Major Williams-Hunt and myself (which were the first to reveal this dense concentration of sites, spread more thickly on the ground than almost anywhere else in Europe). This heavy concentration is of much more than local importance. During the last few years I have examined many thousands of air photographs of Southern and Central Europe taken at various seasons, in the course of my research. While these provide much interesting data and give us, as it were, an illustrated ' Domesday ' survey of Europe in the middle of the 20th century (of capital value to Anthropology), in no other area has there as yet been anything approaching the quantity of crop-marks, grass-marks, soil-marks and earthworks which have come to light in Apulia. There are various reasons for this and a detailed account must await a later report. For our present purposes, it will be enough to single out one or two areas, for comparison.

Perhaps at no time more than the present have British archaeological studies had such need of a stocktaking'. An occasional stocktaking of knowledge and techniques is essential to the successful advancement of any study, and the Council for British Archaeology has undoubtedly stimulated archaeological studies by the publication of the first part of the Survey and Policy of Field Research. Under the joint-editorship of Professor Hawkes and Professor Piggott many of Britain's archaeologists have co-operated to review the present position and the future development of British archaeological studies. The volume is divided into two chapters; the first surveys our archaeological knowledge, and the second indicates how the major problems may best be tackled. Its span in time appals the mere historian. It ranges from the Palaeolithic Age to the 7th century of the Christian Era, from the so-called ' eoliths ' to the so-called ' Kentish jewelry '. No single scholar would have been competent to discuss all the problems raised, and no single scholar is competent to criticize the work of this team of specialists.

The great Syrian fortress of Le Krak des Chevaliers, the best known, as it is on the whole the finest and best preserved, of the Crusader castles, has recently been made the subject of a brilliant and exhaustive study by M. Paul Deschamps; taken in conjunction with earlier notices by Rey, Van Berchem, T. E. Lawrence and others, this has left archaeologists in an exceptionally favourable position with regard to their knowledge of this castle. A few objections on points of detail might be raised to Deschamps' conclusions, but it appears to me that there is only one important question on which further clarification of our existing knowledge is needed : the reconstruction of the siege and capture of the Krak by the great Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Bybars, in April 1271. The accounts given by the Arab historians of the period are not perfectly clear, and the explanations offered by Van Berchem and Deschamps do not appear to be the best possible, in view of the evidence of the fabric itself. In order to obtain a sounder idea of what occurred in the siege, it will first be necessary to consider the buildings and their history in brief.

Every schoolboy knows that King Rimush of Agade was struck down in a Palace revolt-some say pierced to death by sharp bodkins, others that his skull was smashed by heavy stone tablets. And it is now almost common knowledge that Bur-Sin died of a pinched shoe-it may have been following on a septic foot contracted at Eridu, when he was pacing the sand in the precincts of his unfinished Ziggurat. No less undignified was the death of Sin-iddinam of Larsa, crushed to death in his Palace by the fall of a staircase. But who ever heard of a Pharaoh so ludicrously stricken? There lies the difference between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian concept of monarchy. The Pharaoh was a god and the son of a god, made in the image and likeness of Horus, son of Osiris: it is true that was mortal, as was more than one of the ancient gods, but his mortality lay lightly u him because when the time came for his end upon earth he was predestined to rebirth as Osiris. In the Tigris-Euphrates valley a king, whatever else he might be, was pre-eminently a man, even if only a little lower than the angels, and even the mighty Sargonid Kings of Assyria, could on occasion receive and accept a rebuke from their subjects. Indeed the Assyrian kings, whom we are accustomed to think of as arrogant warriors, were no less the slaves of the society they served than the humblest members of their realm.

During The Present Century There Has Appeared A New Kind Of History, Concerned Not With Parts But With The Whole Of Human History. There Were, Of Course, Before This, Many Attempts To Write' Universal History'; But They Consisted Merely In Lumping Together In A Single Continuous Narrative Condensed Histories Of The Chief Countries Of The Old World. This Synthetic Or Accretive Method Has The Same Defects When Concerned With The Sequence Of Time As It Has When Concerned With Space. You Cannot Make A Correct Map Of The World Or Of Any Part Of It Simply By Sticking Together On A Single Sheet The Plans Of Separate Portions Surveyed Independently By Different People, With No Comprehensive Framework Binding Together The Whole Area. Nor, To Vary The Metaphor, Is A Cathedral Constructed By Putting Several Parish Churches Together Beneath One Roof. The New History Is Related To The Old Universal Histories Exactly As Is A Modern Map Of The World To Such Medieval Concoctions As The Hereford Map.