In a note, published in 1934, on the currencies of East Syria under the Roman Empire, I described some clay tesserae from Palmyra which resemble coins in their shape and types, and suggested that they might have been used to supplement the regular metallic currency in emergencies. Some further examples of these tesserae have come to my notice, which add a few details to the account given, and a kindred group has been described in the reports of the excavations at Seleucia-on-Tigris.

The tesserae stamped with designs borrowed from official coins, in all the cases that I have seen, are copies of the types of Sidon noted in the previous article, B.M.C. 87 of the second century B.C. (Fig. 2) and B.M.C. 217 of A.D. 116/7 (Fig. 1). There are now three specimens of the former and four of the latter in the Ashmolean Museum, all from the same dies: they seem to have been produced by a process which resembled striking from dies rather than moulding.

The British Museum possesses parts of a small bottle of clear glass with the figures of two dancing-girls, birds, pomegranate-trees, shrubs, and the fragment of an Arabic inscription painted on it in gold. Admittedly it is one of the finest pieces of Saracenic glass and—as far as that type goes—an early specimen. Its attribution to the Mamluk Sultan Isma'īl, first suggested by Migeon, has been rightly rejected both by Gaston Wiet and C. J. Lamm. The purpose of this note is to submit a new date for this object (Fig. 1) and some reasons in its support.

One of the most popular subjects in the figurative art of Arabic-speaking countries is the dancing-girl. One cannot help feeling that it was just the society which revelled in the drinking of wine, dancing, the use of musical instruments, and other pleasures either forbidden or considered improper by religious law that enabled the artist to get over the unfriendly attitude towards painting the living form, and made him prefer depicting these scenes rather than the more serious aspects of life.

Myres and Richter, A Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum (Oxford, 1899), record three Phoenician inscriptions among the contents of the Cyprus Museum. Since C.C.M. others have been acquired. The catalogue, complete to date, of Phoenician inscriptions in the Cyprus Museum is as follows:

• 1. Larnaka, 1894, C.C.M. 6231 = R.É.S. 1207.

• 2. Larnaka, 1894, C.C.M. 6232 = R.É.S. 1208.

• 3. Dali, found 1887. C.C.M. 6300 = R.É.S. 453. The squeeze from which Euting published did not adequately represent the state of preservation of the stone, and it is to be regretted that the text given in R.É.S. was not based on an independent examination of the stone. From a squeeze supplied to me by Mr. Mitford (Fig. 1) I read and restore as follows:

The stone has been built into the inner wall of a room in the Museum, and it is not now possible to tell how much—whether … or merely —preceded the name of the month.

The ancient Semitic poem here presented is inscribed in alphabetical cuneiform on clay tablets unearthed at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) on the north coast of Syria. The tablets themselves date approximately in the fifteenth century B.C., but their contents were, no doubt, traditional and therefore older still.

2. The poem belongs to a cycle, several portions of which have already been published, which deals principally with the contest of two gods, Ba'al and Mōt, for dominion over the earth. Each in turn defeats his rival and assumes the sovereignty.

In reality, this is a nature-myth pure and simple, for Ba'al is none other than the Lord of the Rain (cp. Arabic ba'l) and Mōt that of the Drought (cf. Arabic mawuth). The alternate victory and defeat of each thus symbolizes the regular alternation of the seasons in the Syrian year. The reign of Mōt, or Drought, covers the weary and rainless months of summer, while that of Ba'al, or Rain, begins in late September and ends some time in March or April.

The texts which are herein published for the first time, except for three which have previously been published by Professor Langdon, belong to the series of ḪAR-ra=ḫubullu.

The series is called ḪAR-ra=ḫubullu from the first line of Tablet I. L. Matouš calls the series Gegenstandslisten (lists of objects), although this name applies properly only to some parts of the series. The two first Tablets are lists of juridical forms. The concordance with Ana Ittišu has been given by Professor Landsberger in his work Ana Ittišu, p. x, and he thinks that, although the whole series is named after the first line of Tablet I, Tablets I and II do not belong to the original stock of this series, but actually he gives no evidence for this opinion. They already belonged, however, to the series at a very early date, as the text of the first Tablet and part of Tablet II published by Ch. Jean in R.A. xxxii (1935), 168 f. shows. The name Gegenstandslisten does not properly apply to Tablets XX and XXI which contain names of towns, countries, mountains, and rivers, and Tablet XXIV is a list of men. Neither can this description be properly applied to Tablets XII, XIV, XV, or XVIII, which contain names of animals and parts of the body. Tablets III-VII give names of trees, parts of trees, products of trees, and wooden objects. Tablets VIII-IX contain names of reed and objects made of reed. Tablets X-XII give names of vessels, ovens, clay objects, hides, chemicals, and objects of bronze, copper, silver, and gold. Tablet XVI contains names of stones and Tablet XVII names of plants, Tablet XIX names of wool and vestments, and Tablets XXII-XXIII provisions.

In certain Assyrian botanical vocabularies there is a group devoted to a series of plant-names many of which begin with ŠE ‘corn’ and GÛ ‘vetch’ (C.T. xiv. 31, K. 8846, r. 1-8: 32, K. 4588, ii, 2–10; S. Smith, C.T. xxxvii. B.M. No. 108860, pl. 29, 11. 35-50). These contain such words as üuṭṭatu ‘barley’, ükibatu ‘wheat’, üšu’ ‘emmer’, ükiššenu ‘vetch’, üḫalluru ‘lathyrus’, üduḫnu ‘millet’, with their Sumerian equivalents.