It may safely be said that every one who has had to do with technical Arabic has had difficulty with wahm and its cognates. Some recent investigations have led me to examine the meanings of these in detail and I endeavour in this paper to give my results. It will be understood that this is not a complete lexicographical handling of the whole root, but only an attempt to discover the more technical uses of some of its phases. In the arrangement of the material I fear that I have not always avoided logical cross-division; but the subject is complicated and will call for reading backward as well as forward. Also I make no attempt to trace the origin of these Arabic psychological conceptions, whether in Greek, Syriac, or elsewhere, or to compare them with any parallel conceptions in modern psychology. Such few references as I may make, of the one kind or the other, are simply to illumine wahm itself.

The publication in two volumes by the “ Text and Translation Society ” of S. Ephraim's Prose Refutation of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaiṣān (1912–21) is an event in Syriac literature. Ephrem is the greatest Father of all the Syrian churches, and these two volumes contain, from the point of view of a modern scholar and theologian, the cream of his polemical writings. It was only two years ago that the Pope, as head of the Catholic Church, promoted the “ Edessene Deacon ” to the rank of a Doctor of the Universal Church, i.e. for all practical purposes, to the rank of a Thomas Aquinas.

On p. 174 of the late Dr. King's History of Sumer and Akkad there is reproduced the design of a cylinder seal of Lugalanda, the patesi of Lagash. In his chronological list in Appendix II to this volume, Dr. King gives the date of Lugalanda as circa 2850 b.c. In the centre of the seal design will be noted a curious geometrical pattern, to which the following reference is made on p. 176:— “Another peculiarity which may here be referred to is the employment on the larger seal, below the inscription, of a sort of arabesque pattern, an ingenious and symmetrical combination of straight lines and curves, the course of which may be followed without once passing along the same line a second time.”

There are the same recognized rules for the decipherment of an unknown script as there are for that of an ordinary cipher, and if they can be followed the script can be deciphered with as much ease as the cipher. Sometimes they cannot be followed, sufficient materials being absent; in this case, all we can do is to wait patiently until the materials are forthcoming.