As I shall, if I live till mid- July, complete a century of life, the Editor has asked me to write some of my views on archaeology, for I have seen the growth of that subject A practically from its beginning. There was no study of the past unless heavily documented, and the Bible was implicitly believed from 'cover to cover'. Curiously enough the discovery in France of early stone tools could be easily accepted if they were called antediluvian, for then they were the remains of the wicked people who were drowned in Noah's flood. Darwin and Huxley were out-and-out atheists. Fortunately for me my parents were interested in these new ideas, and long residence in Calcutta, where my father was in business, had given them sympathy with non-Christian religions. They had equally free-thinking ideas as to education, which according to them should be a training of the child's mind to think. This of course applied to girls as well as boys. Ordinary subjects, such as arithmetic, geography, history I learnt at home, but specialist subjects like music, drawing, French and German, I learnt from specialists. I had no illusions as to my ignorance or my want of brains. This had been well drummed into me, for when we sat for exams my elder sister always passed among the highest, whereas I never once succeeded in getting enough marks to obtain even a pass. But my family had always been very tactful about my invariable failures and I never was allowed to feel my deficiency. So that when on a day in early January, 1894, I made my way to the Edwards Library at University College to join F. L1. Griffith's class on hieroglyphs, I was as full of enthusiasm for a new subject as if I had always been successful.

Lothal is an important harbour-town of the Indus Civilization at the head of the Gulf of Cambay on the west coast of India (FIG. 1). During the recent excavations there, a circular steatite seal has been found which is neither wholly Indian nor Sumerian in workmanship (PL. IX). On the other hand, it closely resembles the seals from the Persian Gulf islands found by the Danish expedition led by Professor Glob and Dr Bibby. Sir Mortimer Wheeler has named them 'Persian Gulf' seals which, according to him, 'appear to have been made at the various entrepôts (such as Bahrain itself) of a cosmopolitan Persian Gulf trade of the kind which has been analyzed by A. L. Oppenheim from Larsa tablets' (note I). Commenting on these seals, the late Col. D. H. Gordon wrote: 'The problem of Bahrain is a very interesting and important one, and it is possible that these seals may help to solve it. Some day such seals may come to light in India, but so far they have not; Bahrain may have been Dilmun and it was almost certainly an entrepôt on the trade route to India, and so it is possible that seals of this kind were carried on to the Indus or to ports in Kathiawad and will some day be found in those localities, though this will not necessarily make them Indian or even of Indian style' (note 2). The hope expressed by Gordon has now been fulfilled by the discovery of a 'Persian Gulf' seal at Lothal, thus providing the first real evidence of trade contacts between India and the Persian Gulf.

I Seem to remember Mr Bruce-Mitford telling me that when he was in the Laurentian Library in Florence, he asked to have that monster of all manuscripts, the Codex Amiatinus, weighed for him. I do not know what the result of the operation was. But perhaps he will forgive me if I say that, when faced with the impressive text codex which comes as a companion to the facsimile of the Lindisfarne Gospels, I was seized with the same awed curiosity, so that my first impulse was to put it on the scales. The net result is: eleven and a half pounds. No need to say that such a formidable array of letterpress is difficult to grasp in its entirety, and that only some aspects of it can be dealt with in a short article-perhaps of necessity those closest to the personal preoccupations of the present writer.

The land known by the name of Dilmun (or Telmun) in the cuneiform documents has been identified by most scholars with the island of Bahrein in the Persian T Gulf (note 1), and for the past nine years a large and competent Danish expedition has been excavating on the island in the hope of uncovering there the origin of the Sumerians and their civilization (note 2). Several scholars have located Dilmun in Iran, south of Elam, and have taken it to be a land bordering on the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, whose hinterland included the province of Persis (note 3). This was the localization of Dilmun which seemed most likely to me when preparing the article 'Dilmun and the Land of the Living' some two decades ago (note 4). In recent years, however, new inscriptional material has become available which indicates that whatever its western boundary, Dilmun extended much farther to the east and included much, if not all, of that part of Iran, Pakistan, and India on which flourished the Indus or Harappan civilization (note 5). The following pages will sketch the pertinent cuneiform evidence for this identification of Dilmun in the chronological order in which it came to my attention over the years.

Excavation of the pond barrow at Normanton Gorse, Wilsford, disclosed the weathered top of a circular and vertical shaft which proved to be nearly 100 ft. in depth. Its fill, the result of natural silting processes, contained pottery in the upper part and, at the waterlogged bottom, broken wooden vessels and other objects, besides a mass of rotted wood, seeds, leaves and other organic remains. The dished and funnelled top of the shaft as well as the uneven sides were, for more than a third of their depth, the product of natural weathering. Below here distinctive antler-pick marks and the clear traces of a broad-bladed metal axe showed that the shaft had been dug in short sections, checked by template and plumbline. No positive trace of how the prehistoric engineers moved up and down their sophisticated shaft remained. Archaeological excavation, beyond the preliminary stages and under exacting and claustrophobic conditions, demanded lighting and mechanical aids. Communication and all-round control posed especial problems.

For obvious reasons, any question concerning the rural archaeology of the Roman West is likely to begin and end in France, and the necessity of taking the French evidence on any given topic into account is something of which non-French historians and archaeologists do not need to be reminded. The fact that such evidence is so often unsatisfactory and incomplete is frequently ascribed to inferior excavation techniques or methods of presentation, but although this is all too often the case a large part of the trouble seems to stem from the lack of proper co-ordination with regard to problems and programmes of study. It happens to be a fact that French archaeologists, in this particular field, are not always interested in the same topics, and are consequently not asking the same questions as their English counterparts. The questions and interests that lie at the back of the excavator's mind as he works are bound to colour the content and composition of his final report, and, unless these questions and interests are brought into the open and written down, the value of the material he provides is bound to be limited. Consequently, any publication which, however slightly, sets out the principles and aims of French rural archaeology is to be welcomed.