Readers of ANTIQUITY are already aware that the second campaign at Ras Shamra—that of the spring of 1930—brought to light several new Phoenician texts. Amongst these pride of place must be given to ten fragments representing in all about a thousand lines of a kind of epic poem, whose various scenes are all laid in the world of the gods. The fragmentary state of the poem increases the difficulties of interpretation, which in any case would have been considerable ; nevertheless, by means of the careful analysis of certain episodes we can now form some sort of general conception of Phoenician mythology as it was about the time of the Ramessids and Amenophis (c. 16th-13th cent. B.c.). In the present article I propose to give a summary account of the results of my researches in this direction.

The gods and goddesses thus brought to life again are more than fifty in number. But two stand out from amongst the rest, and these two are precisely those whom one would expect to find holding higher rank in a document emanating from Phoenicia-El and Baal.

When we look at the great diversity of man’s activities and interests, it is evident how much space they afford for reviewing his history in many different ways. To most of our historians the view of the political power and course of legislation has seemed all that need be noticed; others have dealt with history in religion, or the growth of mind in changes of moral standards, as in Lecky’s fine work. In recent years the history of knowledge in medicine, in the applied sciences, and in abstract mathematics, has been profitably studied, as affording the basis of civilization. The purely mental view is shown in the social life and customs of each age, and expressed in the growth of Art. This last expression of man’s spirit has great advantages in its presentation; the material from different ages is of a comparable nature, and it is easily placed together to contrast its differences. Moreover it covers a wider range of time than we can et observe in man’s scope, but it is as essential to his nature as any of the other aspects that we have named.

The connexion between Maps and Archaeology is of a very obvious and straightforward nature. All distributional problems must, for instance, be studied on maps. If we want to find out about the distribution of the beaker folk, we must plot on a map the finds of the beakers; or if we desire to learn the area covered by examples of the ‘lanternes des morts’, a map of France is essential; the same applies to the study of long barrows and to a very great variety of archaeological studies. Moreover, in a more restricted sense, maps of sites are of the essence of the study of antiquity; we cannot understand the strength of the defences of the ancient Jebusite city unless we pore over the map of the excavations on the spur of Ophel. The excavations of every site are unintelligible without an accompanying map. In a still more restricted sense, each ‘find’ requires to have its position stated by the three co-ordinates of map-making: namely, its distance north or south, east or west, from—and above or below—some datum point in the excavations. Further, the maps themselves may furnish the only record left of some relicof antiquity. And,lastly ,ancient maps—and our present-day maps will one day be ancient—are valuable records of the past, of the culture of the age they represent, of population, human distribution and settlement, and, to some extent, of the science and art of the times. It is much to be regretted that so little mapmaking was done in ancient days. We should give a good deal for accurate contemporary plans of Rome of the time of Nero or of the battle of Hastings. And how much more for a contemporary map of Jerusalem and its surrounding country, before the destruction of the Holy City by Titus !

History has been studied and histories written for more than two millennia. From time to time attempts have been made to discern some pattern or design running through it. But they have usually failed because the data have been inadequate. You cannot see the pattern of a carpet when only a minute portion is uncovered, and you cannot discern the pattern of history until large portions of it are available for examination. It was not until the 19th century that really long vistas were opened up by archaeological exploration in the East. Here, in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Crete, there were found the remains of forgotten civilizations; and Sir Flinders Petrie, one of the pioneers in that work of epoch-making in the literal sense, has himself sketched an outline of the pattern he believes he can see emerging. The present essay is an attempt to interpret and explain that pattern.

Quite a long time ago the Editor received an article on certain liner earthworks in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The author, Mr M.W. Hughes, developed a reasoned hypothesis to account for the facts, basing his argument on the assumption that the course of the ditches marked on the Ordnance Maps was as correct and complete as possible. It seemed desirable, however, to test this in the field, and the Editor therefore applied to the Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey, with very satisfactory results. The course of each ditch was followed on foot, and its characteristic features recorded on the 6-inch map. The investigation thus initiated was carried on until nearly all the Grim’s ditches of Wessex, and some others as well, had been traced. The information thus obtained proved to be of considerable value ; many miles of new entrenchment were discovered, and these will be incorporated on the new (5th) edition of the one-inch Ordnance Map now being prepared, and will also appear in due course on the Ordnance Map of Anglo-Saxon Britain, now in preparation. It also became evident that the name Grim was attached to at least two quite distinct types of entrenchment. The date of each can, as a rule, only be determined by means of excavation; some of these examined are probably prehistoric ; others fall probably within the extreme limits of the years A.D. 350-700. Those dealt with in the present article are almost certainly either late Roman or Saxon.

In his classic work on the Bronze Age pottery of Britain the late Lord Abercromby adopted the old division of the class of beaker pottery into three types originally proposed by Dr Thurnam as far back as 1871. In order that Abercromby may not be misrepresented I propose to quote the essential portions of his definitions. In type A, the ‘ high-brimmed globose beaker ’, ‘ the body is more or less globular ; the upper part, separated from the body by a constriction, frequently very defined, spreads out like the calyx of a flower and forms a brim or neck that almost equals the body in height. The sides of the neck or rim . . . are straight and not recurved at the lip ’. In type B, the ‘ ovoid beaker with recurved rim ’, ‘ there is no distinct demarca- tion between the body and the rim, but the one glides into the other by a gradual curve ’. Finally type C, the ‘ low-brimmed beaker ’, ‘ may be regarded ’, in Abercromby's own words, ‘ as a debased variety of our first type ’.

It should be clear already I think that in labelling his types A, B, and C Abercromby has given the false impression that we have three types of beákers, whereas what we really have are two types, of which one has a ‘debased variety’. We therefore suggest that a less misleading classification would be, for instance, A(x), A(Y), and B. This may seem a trifling point but we believe it has helped to obscure the proper recognition of the true dual character of the Beaker invasion of this country. We propose to substantiate the validity of our suggestion in the course of this short paper.

At the time when Darwin published his Descent of Man comparatively little was known of the fossil remains either of men or apes, so that the discussion of the evidence of palaeontology played an altogether insignificant part in his argument. Apart from the discoveries that had been made in the Neanderthal cave and at Gibraltar, nothing was known of fossil man, and what little was known was puzzling rather than helpful. Little more had then been recovered of the fossil remains of apes than a few fragments of Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus.

In its original form this paper was prefaced with an account, painfully extracted from the somewhat unsatisfactory descriptions in the Historical Monuments Commission’s volumes for Herts and South Bucks and in the Victoria County History, of the existing portions of the earthwork with which I proposed to deal. For the South Oxfordshire Grimsditch, which I ventured to associate with the continuous work which runs through Herts and Bucks, I relied upon Plot and Burn, and some of the original documents used by the latter.

As readers of ANTIQUITY are already aware, the Editor, moved by the conviction that the earnest seeker after truth in this field at least deserved to be supplied with the facts, has during the past two years personally investigated the whole of the remaining fragments of earthworks in the district, and I am therefore able to refer to his paper in the June number, and to the map which he has compiled to illustrate this paper as well as his own, as furnishing a succinct and authoritative statement of the main features of the Chiltern Grimsditch, by which my arguments stand or fall.

The White Horses cut in the turf of the Wessex Downs are familiar to most people who have wandered over the hills of western England, and many have no doubt paused to look at one or another of them and perhaps to ‘hazard a wide solution’ as to its antiquity or origin. But of the fifteen White Horses in Wiltshire and the adjoining counties, only one can be attributed to a date before the eighteenth century. This, the sire of them all, is cut on the north slope of the Berkshire Downs, above the village of Uffington, and gives its name to the fertile plain of mid-Berkshire-the Vale of the White Horse. Camden in writing of the Vale was wholly contemptuous of the Horse, saying that the inhabitants named the district ‘I wotte not from what shape of a white horse, imagined to appeare in a whitish chalky hill’. But despite Camden's scepticism, the Uffington White Horse very definitely exists, and has been cited as a landmark since the eleventh century, when the cartulary of Abingdon abbey records that one Godfric was possessed of Sparsholt juxta locum qui vulgo mons Albi Equi nuncupatur. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Horse is several times mentioned in connexion with the tenure of lands near it. Mr T. H. Ravenhill has recently drawn attention to an early fourteenth century manuscript in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, entitled Tractatus de mirabizibus Britanniae, in which the White Horse is given second place among the Marvels, Stonehenge being first.

One of the most important finds made during last (1929–30) season's excavation at Nineveh, is the collection of beads from 0 what Dr Campbell Thompson, the Director, calls the bead- layer. This layer was about 6 feet thick and situated at a depth of from 27 to 33 feet below the surface on a portion of the site called A and B. In addition, some other beads were found at lesser depths on the part of the site called H, which I think I can show are very closely connected with those from the bead-layer.

How such a large number of beads came to be collected together here it is difficult to explain. As they were found in what appears to be the bed of a small rivulet they may have been washed down.1 The lie of the land at this point makes it probable, but if so they must have been washed out from a large cache at a period when they were very much stronger than today. In their present condition a few minutes rolling in a stream would disintegrate most of the faience beads. Possibly they came from the remains of a bead factory, and the fact that a number of pieces of slag have been found tends to make this theory plausible.

Few of the standard Peruvian histories—much less those politicofantastic tracts which hasty study of the Ancient Peruvian scene has evoked in such number—give any adequate idea of the tremendous cultural background against which the Inka civilization was built up, or of the fact that from that background emerge those archaeological exceptions which constantly question the theories of modern Americanists.

When I acceded to the suggestion of the Editor of ANTIQUITY that I should write a review of the third volume of Sir Arthur Evans’ great work on the palace at Cnossus I was aware of the difficulty of the task I was undertaking. It would of course be quite impossible in a brief article to give any notion of the vast operations which the author has carried through with infinite skill and patience, revealing to us the character of a most curious civilization in Crete, the very existence of which was not suspected until the excavations of Schliemann at Mycenae gave us data. In 1877 I was so much interested by these revelations of the spade that I went to Greece to investigate them, and at Athens Sir Charles Newton and I were shown all the treasures of Mycenae. Newton’s article on them in the Edinburgh Review; and mine in the Quarterly Review, introduced them to English archaeologists, greatly to Schliemann’s satisfaction, as he was openly accused at that centre of scandal, Athens, of having had the rich treasures made by local goldsmiths. And Stephani, perhaps the most learned archaeologist living, was claiming them as the buried spoil of the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire.

Look on this picture and on that! By slow degrees Evans has succeeded in recovering in a great measure the architecture, the art, the manners and customs, the physical type, the religion, of the great civilization of which that revealed at Mycenae was but a late offshoot, a civilization contemporary with the mighty empires of the East, and in some ways more interesting than any of them, since it is more European, more in the line of our civilization and progress.

I Suppose we are all agreed that ‘Celt’ is not a particularly brilliant name for a stone or bronze axe, even though we continue to use it. It survives, of course, not on its merits, but because we really do need a word other than ‘axe’ to denote these narrowedged prehistoric tools, and ‘Celt’ is at present the only substitute we have. We might, I mean, abolish the name Celt if only Celts looked a little more like axes; but we cannot, because there are many people in this world who do not like an axe to be called an axe unless it is the sort of axe they are accustomed to; whereas if you call a not easily recognizable axe a ‘Celt’ and make rather a fuss about explaining that you mean by this a prehistoric axe, then these same people will probably thank you very much indeed and say that it is all most interesting. In other words we keep on talking and writing about Celts because the public like the word; it is, after all, short and sweet, easy to remember, and devastatingly incomprehensible to the uninitiated. I feel that it is necessary for us to put up with ‘Celt’, and I am only remarking here that we know it is a base word of miserable, mistaken coinage. I ask simply that we do not pretend to ourselves that it is a good word on the grounds that it is oldestablished and familiar; it was a bad word in the beginning and it always will be a bad word, despite its now considerable antiquity and frequent use. Lots and lots of blacks do not make a white, not even if the oldest black is 18th century black.

In addition to this name ‘Celt’ which we apply to most of our stone and bronze axes, we also have the group-name ‘palstave’ to distinguish the members of a particular species of the Celt genus. It is a very useful word and I do not think we could do without it, for though we can talk about ‘flat Celts’, ‘flanged Celts’, and ‘winged Celts’, no one has yet succeeded in substituting a snappy descriptive name like these for the palstave-variety of Celt. I should not dream, therefore, of suggesting that we get rid of ‘palstave’ and, indeed, I have myself a considerable affection for this curious word; but as so few of us know what it means or why it is the name of the prehistoric implements concerned, something may profitably be said about its history. That the word happens to come rather badly out of the enquiry is not, of course, my fault.

While engaged in field work near Llanbister in Radnorshire, the writer saw by the roadside, near a country wheelwright’s shop, a remarkable vehicle the like of which he had never imagined. On being questioned, the wheelwright said that it was a ‘wheel-car ’ and was of a standard type used throughout the Radnor forest area (and indeed, as was afterwards learned, throughout the central moorland of Wales). It had been made entirely by himself and his smith. He drew attention to a second example, half completed, in the shop. This was purchased for the Welsh Folk Collection of the National Museum of Wales.

Perhaps the greatest handicap in trying to visualize life in prehistoric Britain is the exiguity of domestic remains, especially on the architectural side. The dwellings themselves were normally of perishable materials so that only their outlines survive, and of their furniture not even that can be said. An exceptional conjunction of circumstances has, however, preserved in Orkney a whole village belonging to a belated Stone Age, with its huts and their fixtures reasonably complete. The huts were built of stone; they had been packed in refuse and were eventually buried by sand, and so the walls still stand to a height of from 8 to 9 feet. The timber shortage prevailing on the wind-swept isle necessitated the translation into stone, and therewith the immortalization of articles such as beds, usually manufactured of ephemeral wood. The village is indeed a highly specialized adaptation to a particular environment so that deductions from it can only be generalized with reservations. Again, though the villagers used only stone and bone tools, they probably lived at a time when bronze, and perhaps even iron, were current in less isolated localities. Still we get here so vivid a picture of Stone Age life in our islands that a summary of the results of four seasons' work may be of interest even to the general reader.

When one phase of decorative art for reasons historical, social, or religious, passes out of existence and is succeeded W by another, there generally occurs what is technically termed an ' overlap '. This is so common that it is often accepted without consideration as universal, and the expression ' Saxo-Norman overlap' is employed with reference to architecture of early twelfth century where it has validity, but also to decorative sculpture where it possesses no solid ground or meaning. Saxon stone carving is on different lines from Norman and the two do not coalesce, the Norman enriched tympanum carrying the Norman art, the free- standing carved cross the Saxon art. The above must be left for the moment as a statement which will later on receive its due explanation and support, but the subject of the present brief paper is germane to it.

It so happens that we possess datable specimens of late Saxon and early Norman sculpture in the shape of carved heads belonging to Saxon crosses that stood on the future site of the Norman Chapter House of Durham Cathedral and may be dated early in the eleventh century, and Norman enriched capitals of columns in the early Castle Chapel that can be placed in date before the year 1100.