While engaged in locust investigations in Ethiopia between 1942 and 1945 I found ample opportunity to indulge my favourite hobby—the study of Christian architecture and antiquities. I knew, before coming to the country, that Ethiopia was little-explored and probably a fruitful field. I had heard of the pre-Christian monuments at Aksum, and of the extraordinary rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, both of which have been long (if not widely) known. But in the end the antiquities that came to light far surpassed my expectations, and I had the satisfaction of visiting many remarkable monuments, which have rarely been seen by Europeans, hidden away in the mountain fastnesses of the northern highlands. One or two Italian archaeologists had, it is true, begun to pay attention to some of these buildings, but I believe no connected account of the early Ethiopian style of architecture has yet been attempted, I propose in this summary article to confine myself mainly to the internal history of the monuments, only touching upon the more difficult question of the ultimate sources of the style.

In his Report on Excavations at Wroxeter, 1923–27, Professor Atkinson has discussed at some length (Appendix c, pp. 345–62) the origin of the type I of Forum-Basilica block which seems to have been generally adopted for the civic centres of Romano-British tribal capitals. He concludes that this plan (which he designates the principiatype) is of military origin, based on legionary principia, and was adopted ‘perhaps first in the Flavian period, under military influence, in provinces where this was strong and civil development weak and backward … for use as the administrative centre of the civil town’.

It was early in 1944 that the production of a film on British prehistory was agreed upon at the Ministry of Education. It may be that war conditions made it easier I to get this unorthodox project adopted—the attention of a possible opposition was distracted. Nevertheless it is remarkable that in the middle of a war two Government departments (the Ministry of Information is the producing agency) should undertake a work apparently so unpractical and so little urgent. It would have been interesting to be present in the Admiralty office in the then very strictly prohibited area of the Orkneys when the request came through for a permit for a film director to visit the island’s prehistoric monuments. He was permitted. If there is a racial generalization which has some truth, it is that the English are a tolerant people.

The water-mill with the horizontal wheel remains a characteristic feature of peasant Tc ulture in several Faeroe settlements, but its remaining days of usefulness among the islands are doubtless numbered. Formerly, nearly all the villages appear to have maintained one or more such mills for the production of rugmjJ, the coarse brown flour made from the six-rowed barley (Hordeurn vulgare Linn.), but in the majority of places these interesting structures have fallen into desuetude, or have vanished completely, within the last thirty or forty years.

These brief remarks of Al Makdisi, from his account of the first colonization of Khwarizm, contain much of interest. For evidently in early medieval times there still survived in Khwarizm a vague traditional memory of an ancient culture, when the sandy islands of the great Oxus delta and the lowlands round the Sea of Aral were inhabited by sedentary fisher-folk, the ancestors of the creators of the brilliant but little known civilization of ancient Khwarizm.