There is much confused thinking about swords, the way they were used and the influence of their users on their form. An extreme case is that of the late Harold Peake who, describing a sword-type, said: ‘These weapons, which must have been used as hatchets as well as for slashing, are called leaf-shaped swords’. He may, of course, have meant that they were used for hacking as well as for slashing—uses which, as I shall show, differ more than one would think; but it does sound as if he thought that the Late Bronze Age warrior used his prized sword for chopping firewood.

Take nomenclature and definitions first. In the apparent absence of agreed definitions, each writer has to invent his own or leave it to the reader to do so. Peake, on the same page as the sentence just quoted, makes his definitions by stating that the dagger gave birth to the dirk and the dirk to the sword. I shall adopt this clear and concise nomenclature, but divide swords into two groups—long and short.

IF one looks at a world map, or better still at a globe, one sees that Asia can easily be thought of as the central part of the world from which all other parts radiate-the Americas as well as Europe and Africa-whilst Indonesia and Melanesia provide a fairly good land bridge to Australia. In considering the Polar Regions it is important to realise that the Behring Strait has never been a barrier between the Asiatic and American continents. Eskimo live on a narrow strip of land on the Asiatic side, as well as along the coasts of the American Arctic, whilst those on the Diomede Islands in the middle of the strait up to recent times would sail in their skin boats to both Asia and Alaska in the summer, and travel thence by dog-sled in winter, Trade between the two continents has always been of considerable importance.

It was in July 1952 that Mr Michael Ventris announced his solution of the fifty-year-old puzzle of the Minoan Linear B script. The announcement was at first received with proper scepticism, for many ‘solutions’ had already been published, none of which had proved convincing upon closer inspection. Most of them had been based upon quite inadequate collections of material, for it was not until the spring of 1952 that all the inscriptions in that script then known were published. Mr Ventris' theory, the first to be built upon broad enough foundations, has now withstood more than a year's testing, and its essential correctness has been vindicated by its successful application to new and unpublished material. Mr Ventris has generously made his work available to interested scholars, and an international group is now collaborating with him in pressing forward the decipherment of the tablets along the lines he has laid down. Although much remains to be done, the basis of the solution is no longer in doubt, and we can now offer a preliminary summary of the results of this remarkable discovery.

The religions of pre-Indo-European Europe are a large and difficult subject; but a sufficiently wide survey turns out to be less complicated than might seem possible. For full perspective, however, account has to be taken both of Western Asia and of Northern Africa as far as the Guinea Coast and Ethiopia. On the other hand, Indo-European peoples have intruded so far, and also have in turn been overlaid so deeply that it is not always easy to recognize Indo-European survivals at all; wide regions have been stripped—by Islam especially—not only of Indo-European but of the earlier cultures as well.

At the end of the last war it became known to archaeologists in this country that there had been published in Germany in 1943 the first part, itself in two massivevolumes, of a monumental survey of the Spanish chambered tombs by Dr and Frau Leisner. Die Megalithgraber der Iberischen Halbinsel-I Der Suden was sponsored and produced by the Romisch-Germanische Kommission, and for the first time the results of the excavations of Siret, Bonsor and others were presented to scholars in a manner which set a new standard in the publication of such material. The work is noteworthy not only for its detailed and informed discussion of the tombs and their contents, but for its scheme of total presentation of the evidence in visual form and to uniform conventions of scale and draughtsmanship, supported by photographs where necessary.

The Victorians were great collectors. They fortified themselves by collecting other men's land and its products ; glorified themselves with collections of children, relations and pompous civic buildings ; and justified it all with a series of facts collected from the Family Bible, and from accounts of primitive men and Evolution. Their attitude to everything was captative ; and only in moments of extreme distraction were they oblative. Those who had recently ‘ arrived ’ loaded glass-fronted cabinets with sets of china—never used, for fear that they would be broken. They could fill their drawing-rooms with hideous statuettes, and cover their mantelpieces with stupid bric-àbrac and an occasional palaeolith—because there was at least one parlourmaid to dust them. Even more intelligent men, less anxious to impress their families and friends, were afflicted with the same disease : their motives were acquisitive rather than artistic or truly scientific; and if there was any philosophy other than that of mere gain, underlying their systematic collection of curios, it was the philosophy of Evolution, and with it the complacent belief in progress from Palaeolithic Man with his pathetic flint scrapers, to the Victorian Superman, with his eighty-bladed Sportsman's knife.

The process commonly called Interpretatio Romana, by which in ancient times a barbarian deity was identified with some Roman god or goddess, was admittedly of a locally very different nature. To quote an example: In Southern Gaul we find a whole series of Celtic deities connected with hot healing springs, Bormo, Grannus, Belenus, Nisincius, all in due course identified with Apollo. It seems obvious that the function of healing provided the link or association between the native deity and the Roman god. With this sole function their properties were not exhausted. But the fact that there are traces of fertility-aspects, that they were nearly always associated with a female consort or mother, etc., is a thing apart; there is no indication that these characteristics influenced the identification. Neither did the connection with hot springs, as far as I can see. We hear of an Apollo Thermios in Lesbos and at Thermon in Aetolia; in the Aegean island he was at any rate a patron of hot springs. Likewise, there were cults of Apollo near hot springs in Anatolia. But there are no indications whatever that these beliefs influenced the Roman Apollo.

The Oxford Dictionary defines magic as ' the pretended art of influencing the course o f events by compelling the agency of spiritual beings (black magic) or by bringing into operation some occult controlling principle of nature (white magic) '. The great gaps in our knowledge of disease, coupled with the patient's demand that all disease shalI receive treatment in spite of our ignorance, insure the survival of many practices falling within this definition of white magic. But in the dawn of medicine it was black magic that predominated. To primitive man illness is a mysterious occurrence without any obvious cause ; his earliest explanation was the belief that an evil spirit had entered into the sufferer and his first attempts at treatment were directed to driving the demon out. Our oldest medical treatise is the Ebers papyrus, found in Egypt a century ago but dating from the reign of Amen-hetep I of the 18th dynasty (about 1550 B.c.). The Smith papyrus is even older but is mainly concerned with surgical conditions. The Ebers papyrus prescribes invocations to be uttered when taking a dose of medicine: ' Come remedy, come drive it out of this my heart, out of these my limbs ' ; ' Oh demon who dwellest in the body of . . . son of . . . come forth.' These invocations have their modern counterpart in the Latin imperatives and the symbols, deliberately unintelligible to the layman, which the doctors of today are trained to append to their prescriptions. And the numerous medicines mentioned in this pharmacopoeia are of a highly obnoxious character, emetics and purges, calculated to make the body of the patient SO unpleasant an abode for the resident demon that he would be glad to quit if not forcibly ejected with the physical evacuations. Lizards, stinking fat, the excreta of human beings, donkeys, dogs and cats, putrid meat, are all prescribed. Castor oil and mandragora are listed amongst the herbal remedies. The belief that a medicine must be nasty to be beneficial though now obsolescent in England lasted to our own day: Gregory's powder and other nauseous remedies remain vivid memories of the older generation and historically they owe their origin to their unpleasantness.

Since 1947 there has been a considerable advance in East African Archaeology. The preliminary archaeological survey of the East African coastline and islands has been almost completed. The area covered has stretched from the coast of British Somaliland to the frontiers of Portuguese East Africa ; two stretches of the Tanganyika coast and the Mafia group of islands off the mouth of the Rufiji still remain unsurveyed, but it is hoped that these may be covered by the close of 1954. It has been essentially a surface survey, a fairly complete photographic record has been made of the principal sites, and plans have been made of some of the chief monuments. During the same period Mr Kirkman has carried out excavations at the very representative Gedi site, and his detailed report is about to be published by the Oxford University Press. At seven other sites there have been preliminary excavations. It is at last possible to suggest a few tentative conclusions.

That a system of writing had been in use in the Mycenaean civilisation on the mainland of Greece had been known ever since the then existing evidence was collected by Tsountas and Manatt in The Mycenaean Age, published in 1897. Further evidence thereafter slowly accumulated. An inscribed stirrup jar was found at Orchomenos in 1903. In subsequent years others were discovered at Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis; but in the fourth volume of The Palace of Minos, published in 1935, Sir Arthur Evans could only say as regards the Greek mainland ‘ the absence of clay tablets should be rather set down to the accidents of discovery or to climatic causes ’. Four years later in 1939 Professor Blegen found in the newly discovered Palace of Nestor at Pylos an archive room with several hundred inscribed clay tablets. This number he has further increased in his resumed excavations in 1952. In recording the discovery of the House of the Oil Merchant at Mycenae in 1950 I ventured to prophesy that if the excavation of that house could be completed it was quite likely that inscribed clay tablets would be found in its ruins. In the complete excavation of that house at Mycenae in the summer of 1952 the prophecy was fulfilled and thirty-eight clay tablets were found in two of its rooms. This is a discovery of the first importance; in conjunction with the tablets from Pylos it shows that we must expect to find inscribed clay tablets in any Mycenaean palace or large private house on the Greek mainland. There must have been tablets in the palace at Mycenae but that site was badly damaged by later building above it and subsequent denudation. At Tiryns too there must have been tablets, but that site like the Mycenae palace was excavated in the 1880’s when archaeologists were not so alive to the possibilities of what might be found. A clay tablet in the earth or even just out of the earth is barely recognizable as such. Consequently the excavator himself must have a good eye for such things and train his workmen to observe and preserve even the most insignificant looking objects of clay. It is probably too late now to find tablets at Tiryns, but some presumably must still lurk in the ruins of the palace at Thebes if that site can ever be fully excavated. The Acropolis of Athens with the palace of Erechtheus presumably once had tablets, but the classical buildings and the excavations of the last century there have destroyed any hope of their survival.

Though everyone now agrees that the unicorn never existed, this unanimity is quite recent. All through the 19th century there were periodic reports of its presence in darkest Africa or on the Asiatic steppes, and hopes that it would turn out to be a reality died hard. But if there never was such a creature why did the men of the Middle Ages believe in it so firmly and depict it so often? As Christians it was incumbent on them to do so, for it was mentioned in the Old Testament and, therefore, must be real. Its presence there was due to the authors of the Septuagint, the Hellenised Jews who, at Alexandria, in the centuries between the city's foundation and the Christian era, translated their sacred books from Hebrew into Greek and on seven occasions used the word μονόκερως (Greek for unicorn).

I have it in mind that our Royal Patron, in the course of her Christmas broadcast to her peoples, used the following words:

Those words have recurred to me more than once since I first heard them, and I take them as the text for the short address which recent custom demands of me this afternoon.

The ‘spirit of adventure’. I suppose that the phrase contains nearly all that makes life worth while; but to define it is another matter. We in this room today represent an era which has had its fill of rudimentary adventure, or has at least had ready opportunity for hazards beyond the dreams of Henty. In saying that, I am consciously contrasting our lot with that of our parents or grandparents, living as they did in an epoch of certainty, in an environment of good solid mahogany, with the picture always before them of a little sedate Old Lady in whose house there was no room for the word ‘ defeat ’. Adventure there was in plenty in that bygone world, but it was sharply discrete from the security of the average household outside the services. By the adventurous of spirit it had for the most part to be sought, and sought deliberately, whether in two dimensions or in three. And sought it was. In those far-off days, for example, I can recall the sturdy figure of my father, living the most humdrum of lives and eking it out with a vicarious adventuring that comes back freshly to my memory. As he strode regularly to or from his office, his daily existence was packed with boyish adventure. Tartarin, all Tarascon, had nothing to offer him. He had, in vivid imagination, forded the Kabul river under fire, until he could describe the splash of every bullet; he had never actually been east of Nuremberg, but he had shot man-eating tigers whose breath lay hot upon my boyish ears. All men who had striven beyond the frontiers were his heroes. His worshipped familiars ranged in fact from Robertson of Chitral to a commissionaire who had marched to Kandahar with Roberts. To a later generation such episodes have become a commonplace, but I have sometimes doubted whether a familiar actuality could ever have held a candle to my father’s world of fancy.

The French scholar, Marc Bloch, describes two open field systems in France; the one with long narrow strips grouped in furlongs and ploughed by a long wheeled plough la charrue, the other with small rectangular plots ploughed by a short wheel-less plough, l'araire. R. G. Collingwood has taken up Marc Bloch by suggesting that in England, in Romano-British times, the charrue (carnea) was used on the Villa farms, whilst the araire (aratrum) was employed in the small plots of the villagers, the so-called ‘Celtic Fields’. He further suggests that the Celtic Fields were enclosures.

During the 19th century students of Scottish archaeology were fascinated by souterrains or earth-houses. In 1877 Joseph Anderson declared that ‘no class of structural remains has been more fully illustrated’, and his statement is supported by an abundance of papers and reports published in the first twelve volumes (1851-78) of the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. As the century drew to its close the earth-house gradually lost its hold on archaeological imagination. There were occasional papers and a few notable discoveries, but on the Whole the first half of the 20th century was a period of stagnation in this not unrewarding field. French scholars peered with organized enthusiasm into their souterrains-refuges, but in Scotland it was the close season for earth-houses. A little of the old interest has lately revived, and this may be an opportune moment to consider some of the more obvious problems that surround these curious structures.

In the course of excavation, diggers at many sites come upon a layer in the accumulated debris having such a considerable ash content as to convince them that the settlement occupying the site at that particular period had been destroyed by fire; and this supposition is of course strengthened if the ceramic forms or other cultural objects contained in the mound change at this point. While in very many instances these deductions are probably correct, it is the purpose of this paper to examine what destruction by fire entails in the way of preparation, how it is affected by the style of structures involved and whether the total destruction of villages by fire or their inhabitants by the sword is as simple a procedure as would sometimes appear to be imagined. Having taken part in the destruction by fire of a number of villages of the type that obtains, and must have obtained for centuries past, in the Indo-Afghan borderlands, I have learned by experience that the casual application of a torch will not necessarily set fire to anything.