The Treasury of Atreus is one of the most important monuments of the Bronze Age in Greece and is universally recognized as the supreme example of Mycenaean architecture. It is also the finest of all the many beehive or tholos tombs which are such a striking feature of Mycenaean culture. The beehive-tomb is essentially a creation of the architecture of the Greek mainland and of Mycenaean as opposed to Minoan building. In Crete so far three beehive-tombs of Bronze Age date are known, two of which—one at Hagios Theodoros and another just found at Knossos—date from late L.M. III, the very end of the Bronze Age. The third, found at Knossos in 1938, is not to be dated earlier than 1500 B.C. All three are small and poorly constructed. The Early Bronze Age circular ossuaries of Mesarà in Crete, often erroneously described as beehive-tombs, are, as Professor Marinatos has provel nothing of the kind. On the other hand, on the Greek Mainland and in the islands immediately adjacent to it, at least forty beehive-tombs are so far known. These figures are enough to indicate that the beehivetomb is a product of Mainland or Mycenaean rather than of Cretan or Minoan architecture. More accurate information about the date and construction of the Treasury of Atreus, the finest of all the beehivetombs, cannot fail to enlarge our knowledge of the history and art of the Mycenaean civilization.

The dictum of Clark Wissler that ‘New World culture is [thus] a kind of pyramid whose base is as broad as the two Americas and whose apex rests over Middle America’ is one of those brilliant generalizations which at once sum up the conclusions already reached, and point the way to further progress.

From the vantage of today one may agree with A. V. Kidder (22, p. 145) that American archaeologists have been unduly neglectful of the broad base of their pyramid. Yet itwould be churlish to blame them when the apex was so enticing, so rich, so bizarre and above all so enigmatic. Indeed, when men first descried the peaks of Maya, Mexican and Peruvian achievement, it seemed hard to connect them with the lowly foot- hills of cultural attainment familiar in the temperate latitudes of the western hemisphere. Until the underlying unity of civilization in the New World was recognized, its pyramidal structure could hardly be appreciated; in default of this it is easy to understand how archaeologists tended to neglect cultures, which, however interesting they may appear to us from the historical angle, must have appeared to them as intrinsically poor and dull. Then again it was only on the edges of the pyramid that the foundation layer was visible; elsewhere it was buried under a superstructure, massive in proportion to its attractiveness.

Until the year 1939 the archaeology of Britain in Anglo-Saxon times has had to concern itself little with ship-burials and to no great extent with rich burials of any kind. If we omit those in the county of Kent and a few important burials at Taplow, Broomfield, and elsewhere, the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon graves in general presents few striking features besides its almost universal poverty.

One of the many pitfalls encountered in the search for evidence of roses in ancient times is the use of the word ‘rose’ in connexion with flowers having no association whatever with roses, e.g. the Rose of Jericho and the Rose of Sharon. This is particularly true of references in the Old Testament, although some of them, notably in Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom of Solomon and Esdras, undoubtedly refer to the rose and rose bushes. Wild roses flourish in Palestine, an attractive type being Rosa phoenicea, whose clusters of creamy-white bloom are sufficiently striking to invite attention. This rose would be known to the ancients, for it is found scattered in numerous localities in the Troad and Syria. It is, of course, impossible to record with reasonable certainty the full tale of roses with which the ancient world was familiar, but sufficient sources of information remain to enable a fair appraisal to be made. Some of the roses have stayed in cultivation down the centuries, and are still grown in gardens. Others, such as the ‘.twice-blooming’ roses of Paestum, have vanished, and an exact description is impossible.

Ost of the gold ornaments represent the very splendid outer harness of a princely apparel, doubtless the sword-belt and baldrick, and also a purse and the straps on which it was slung. From the point of view of sheer weight of gold, the chief find was a huge and heavy buckle, inlaid with niello ; but the harness included twentyeight other pieces, all richly jewelled with garnets and, in some instances, blue and white mosaic glass. We must remember too that the sword has a jewelled gold hilt and two hemi-spherical bosses of gold, jewelled with garnet and blue glass, on the sheath (PLATE IX). There are also a number of minor fragments of gold, including one or two unornamented strap-mounts, two jewelled filigree strips of great delicacy, and a tiny mount of gold foil in the form of an animal. The excavators also found various ornamental fittings of wood or a similar material that were plated with gold.

There is considerable doubt in my mind whether this account of a journey to Petra should appear in a journal of ANTIQUITY’S standard of integrity. The only reason why I have agreed to allow it to be published is that I hope it will arouse interest in this neglected part of the late Roman Empire, with the result that some responsible archaeologist will follow in our footsteps and also see to it that some photographs are taken from the air. This is particularly important, because in the general dun yellow of the desert sand with its outcrops of umber brown rocks, it is extremely difficult when one is on the ground level to decide if one is looking at natural formations or the general lay-out of some vast irrigation system. I realized this the first time I flew from El Arish on the coast to Kosseima, and saw that this stretch of seemingly bare desert I knew so well was dotted thickly with the remains of small stone farm-houses and orchards, and that there was a general scheme of irrigation in every wadi (dry water-course).

The study of Greek board-games is almost wholly inconclusive, owing to the scanty and extremely imprecise evidence available. Difficulties would in any case be inevitable, since most games are better grasped in actual play than by studying a set of written rules; and here the technicalities are expressed in a foreign language and were sometimes not clear even to their users, who cheerfully omit what they do not understand, or take it for granted that the reader is familiar with the main details. Further, the games so described by our authorities had often been long obsolete. Some of the difficulties may be realized by trying to reconstruct a game of Ombre entirely from Pope’s Rape of the Lock, or a game of cricket from Dickens’ account of All Muggleton v. Dingley Dell (even with the help of Mr A. G. Macdonell’s searching critique of that famous match). Here is an example of a rather different kind, which well shows the pitfalls of unfamiliar teiminology; it is translated from K. Silex’s John Bull xu Hause, and is an attempt to explain cricket to Germans. ‘Two teams of II men oppose each other; two “wickets” are set [how ?] in the ground at a distance of 20 metres, being three wooden sticks [how high ?], over which two rods (Stäbe) are laid [how?]. The aim is to hit the wicket with a ball [how big?] or to knock off the rods with it. One side defends the wicket, the other attacks; the defenders post before each wicket [where ?] a “batsman” with a striker (Schläger): the other side opposes him with a “bowler” who tries to hit the wicket with the ball [how?]. Two men only of the defence are in actual play, the rest wait their turn’ … etc.

The wonderful find at Trelleborg: near Slagelse in Denmark is all too little known in this country. In fact the name of Trelleborg itself is practically unknown, or confused with the town of the same name in Sweden.

The site is one of the most important earthworks in Denmark. The rampart measures 25 metres in thickness. It lies on the eastern shore of the Great Belt, and as Herr Poul Nörlund, the explorer of the site, himself says of it: ‘Trelleborg lies even now so much out of the way that there are few places in the much built-up coast of Vestsjæland which are so difficult to find, with no direct road leading to it’.

For modern Europeans the wheel is the most characteristic implement used in the making of pottery. The history of the potter’ wheel, which has lately been described briefly and clearly by the German, Adolf Rieth,l evidently goes back several thousands of years. In southern Mesopotamia the potter’s wheel can be traced continuously from at least the fifth millennium before Christ, and the Egyptians ado ted the technique 3000 years before our era. It is characteristic t 1 at pottery-making with the help of the wheel is man’s work, and that it nearly always seems to belong to an advancing urban culture with its associated specialization of labour. It stands, as a rule, for greater efficiency, and indicates, on the whole, artistic degeneration—at any rate in early times, until man has learnt to bring his implement o perfection. At the same time the old technique survived and took on hybrid forms with the new. A similar relation can be observed throughout the history of Danish pottery.

The largest of the hanging-bowls from Sutton Hoo is distinguished by the abundance and the brilliance of the mosaic glass adorning its mounts, and by the mannered drawing of its delicate Celtic scroll-patterns. The character of the mosaic glass links this bowl very closely with the newly discovered bowl from Scunthorpe, Lincs., and, but less closely, with the bowl from Barlaston, Staffs., and the bowl represented by the Northumberland escutcheons in the British Museum. Only the Scunthorpe bowl, however, bears mosaic of comparable elegance, and it is also much closer to the Sutton Hoo bowl in its ornamental style. This Celtic style has been studied by Mr Leeds' and Franqoise Henry,2 and, therefore, to Sutton Hoo and Scunthorpe we can add as further representatives of the same school of design the wellknown Faversham mount^,^ the escutcheon from Barrington, Cambridge, the enamelled bronze vessel from Needham Market, Suffolk, and the escutcheon from Benniworth, Lincs.

We have not hitherto considered the East Angles as a showy and conspicuously prosperous folk. In the Settlement Period we find them, as Mr Myres says, 'a federation of several smaller peoples' living in groups that were geographically isolated and to a certain extent independent of each other. Their material wealth would be judged by such a cemetery as Caistor-by-Nonvich, and on the evidence available before the Sutton Hoo discovery we should not have credited them with any unusual skill in the crafts or with the possession of notable riches. But we now know that in the early seventh century the folk inhabiting the coastal area between the Orwell and the Alde were the subjects of a prince whose grave contained one of the most magnificent and costly furnitures that has ever been found in a Teutonic tomb. Hitherto, when we have wanted to show off the richness of Anglo-Saxon England, we have looked to Kent. Now we have learnt that in one limited area of Suffolk, where lies Rendlesham, a vicus regius of the East Anglian ruling dynasty, the maximum brilliance of Kentish archaeology was not only equalled, but surpassed in splendour ; and we realize that the house of Wuffa (the sixth century grandfather of Redwald) thus put to shame the rich royalties of Kent, at the time of, or only shortly after, the reign of Kent's greatest king, Ethelbert.

Whithorn in Galloway and Kirkmadrine nearby are famous to the archaeologist and historian as the homes of the oldest Christian monuments in Scotland, namely the memorial stones still to be found there. They were erected in a district where the church history of Scotland originated through the efforts of St. Ninian. A few lines in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, III, 4, contain the earliest traditions about him which have come down to us. According to this late record, ‘Nynia’ was a British bishop who brought the Christian faith to the southern Picts (australes Picti). He had got his spiritual instruction in Rome, and had his episcopal see and his last resting-place amidst other saints-at Whithorn, Ad Candidam Casam, so called after the church dedicated to St. Martin which he built of stone, a fashion unusual to the Britons. As to his age, Bede merely says that he was at work a long time before St. Columba came to the northern Picts in 565. The intercourse with Rome can hardly have been later than the fifth century; a dedication to St. Martin who probably died in 397, cannot have been made before the same century. When Bede finished his History in 731, Whithorn was under Northumbrian rule, belonging to the northern ‘province’ of Bernicia. An English episcopal seat had been erected there shortly before, having Pecthelm as first bishop (Hist. eccl v, 23); he had been a long time deacon and monk in Wessex with Aldhelm, the abbot of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherborne, famous for his writings, who died in 709. Pecthelm was one of Bede’s authorities (ib., v. 13, 18); so it has been suggested that the latter was indebted to Pecthelm for his knowledge of Ninian. Pecthelm was one of the correspondents of St. Boniface who also came from Wessex, and who wrote him a letter on a question of canonical law shortly before he (Pecthelm) died in 735. It must also be noted that Bede distinguishes clearly between Whithorn, situated amongst the British, and the Pictish country, the scene of Ninian’s missionary efforts.