The face of the country is the most important historical document that we possess. Upon the map of England-‘ that marvellous palimpsest ’—is written much of English history : written in letters of earth and stone, of bank and ditch, of foliage and crop. As is the case with every map, the writing is not such as he that runs may read. It needs patience to discover, knowledge to decipher, insight, sometimes amounting to genius, to interpret. But the writing is there, all else awaits the competence of the reader.

Of all the prehistoric periods yet distinguished in Western Europe the Neolithic has suffered the hardest fate. Having in the past enjoyed a seemingly secure and important position in the field of prehistory, with an estimated duration of several thousand years, this unfortunate period has of late been so assailed before and behind that its very existence has been called in question. In Britain, however, recent researches seem to have rescued our Neolithic from complete extinction by the encroaching Mesolithic and Bronze Ages, and given it an established position once more, albeit a more humble one than it occupied in its days of undue inflation. Because it has become better understood, an epoch to which formerly thousands of yearswere allocated is now limited to hundreds.

One of the outstanding problems of British archaeology and perhaps the most important of those which still await solution, is that involved in the revival of Celtic and La T h e motives in 7th century art. This question has been discussed in various recent publications by Dr Mahr, Mr Kendrick and Dr Wheeler. So far however there is no sign of ultimate agreement. With this question is bound up the origins of that Irish Christian art which had so spectacular a blooming in such objects as the Books of Durrow and Kells, the high crosses of Monasterbois and Clonmacnoise and the Tara brooch.

Many years ago, when searching for accounts of cremations which might illustrate those described by Homer, I came across a paper by the late Dr Joseph Anderson, entitled ‘ Ceremonies at the Incremation of a Norse Chief ’, read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1872. A large part of it consists of a translation, apparently the only one in English, of the narrative of an Arab, Ahmad bin Fudhlan, who early in the 10th century visited a Scandinavian settlement on the Volga and there witnessed the cremation of the body of a chief. Though it attracted much attention at the time and is of great intrinsic interest, Anderson’s paper is now virtually unknown, and except for Orientalists the important Arab document is available only in Holmboe’s Danish version, from which Anderson made his translation, and in Fraehn’s German translation of 1823, As Anderson’s translation was not made from the Arabic, was slightly expurgated, and is not very accessible, it seems worth while to publish a new translation made from the original text by Miss Charis Waddy. This was originally intended to form an appendix to an article on cremation in the Aegaean area and in Homer which had appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, but proved to be too long. I am grateful for the opportunity of publishing it, almost simultaneously, in Antiquity, for it supports the point which I sought to establish, viz. : that for all the glamour thrown over it by Homer, cremation of the dead is naturally associated with a somewhat barbaric culture, and in the case of the Greeks was mainly practised at an early date and by the more backward members of the race.

‘Gently undulating gravel plain ’, ‘ limitless expanse of rolling sand ’, ‘ succession of low sandstone ridges ’—such phrases are common in any book of desert travel, for most of the desert is featureless almost to monotony were it not that its very monotony has a charm which, for those who have felt it, no other landscape can rival. In the desert anything unusual attracts, a patch of rare shade, a hollow with a few dried bushes, a conspicuous hill,—one is drawn to each, sometimes to find the remains of some earlier and less fortunate visitor. So a 6000-foot mountain set down in the heart of one of the worst, one of the most ‘ howling ’, deserts in the world merits and receives its share of attention.

In his appendix (pages 84–5) to his Changes in the Fauna of Wales within Historic Times, Mr Colin Matheson, refers to ‘ the old Welsh text known as Y Naw Helwriaeth or The Nine Huntings [which] has been generally regarded as setting forth the hunting customs among the early Welsh ’. This text has been published in the Myvyrian Archaiology (2nd edition, pp. 872-3) and in Dr John Davies’s Dictionarium duplex (1632). Both these printed texts however differ in various details from the three known manuscript versions, and while the versions of two of the manuscripts are fairly similar, that of the third differs markedly from the other two. An edition with annotations in Welsh of the three manuscript texts was published (for the first time) by the present writer in 1933. It was thought that since the texts presented problems of interest to students of British history, a collated translation of the two texts together with a translation of the third, and differing, text would prove to be of value to those unacquainted with Welsh.

The unique interest of Sidonius lies in the fact that he ‘ stands between the old world and the new, and is a witness for both of them ’ (p. 166). His letters are almost the only non-theological documents of the fifteen centuries which have survived; and this fact alone gives them a historical value that cannot be exaggerated. A critical and well-documented biography by one who has made the subject his own is therefore most welcome. In the following pages I do not propose to say more by way of commendation of the admirable biography by Mr C. E. Stevens, but rather to consider certain special points in it which are of current interest, Needless to say, the interpretation of the history of the period is my own, and the author would very probably dissent strongly from it,