Sir Leonard Woolley found last year at Al Mina in the surface soil an interesting cylinder seal. It is published, but without comment, in J.H.S. 1938, pl. xv. It is now in the British Museum, numbered 126064 (Plate I, 2).

It is of whitish chalcedony, 1½ inches high. The design, which is marred by a chip in the middle, falls into three parts and represents a scene of worship. In the left of the impression is a large figure of a worshipper; in the centre, a kneeling man upholding a winged deity; and on the right, a shrine before which the other two actions are imagined happening. Above are various divine symbols.

The Near East glyptic collection in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, has been virtually unknown except for the original ‘Tarkondemos’ seal rediscovered and published by Dr. Dorothy K. Hill (Archiv Orientálni, IX, 1937, 307–10). The collection, though numbering only 128 pieces, is interestingly varied. Unfortunately, there is no record of where any of the seals were found; all were purchased from dealers.

The plaster impressions that have found their way into the Walters Art Gallery are included in this study. No information regarding the whereabouts of the originals is available.

The literature on the glyptic art of Mesopotamia and the surrounding countries is large and very scattered. No one has attempted to compile a complete bibliography, and the best available list of publications is Von der Osten's. At present there is much scholarly activity focussed on the study of seals, as is exemplified by the recent and the forthcoming contributions of Frankfort, Herzfeld, Van Buren, et al.

In the museum of the Department of Egyptology at the University of London there is a collection of terra-cotta heads and figures discovered by Sir Flinders Petrie in the workmen's quarter at Memphis. They have been published by the Egyptian Exploration Fund in the volumes Memphis I, Palace of Apries (Memphis II), and Meydum and Memphis III.

My interest was aroused by the fact that there were among them a number of terra-cottas of Indian type, but I soon found that the dates given by Sir Flinders Petrie differed greatly from those which, on stylistic grounds, I should have myself assigned to figures of this type had they been discovered in India. In addition to this I felt very sceptical about the ‘Sumerian’ heads, which I considered had survived in a manner little short of miraculous. This article is an attempt to show that the ‘Sumerian’ heads are not in fact Sumerian at all but the heads of Buddhist priests, and that the whole collection covers a period not exceeding one hundred and fifty years: probably that of middle first century B.c. to the end of the first century A.D.

In my small book Ancient Cyprus, published in 1937, I attempted to collect all the known examples of the Bronze Age script of Cyprus. Until I compiled my list it had been assumed that there were only some fifteen signs of the Bronze Age known. These were listed by Evans, first in Scripta Minoa and later, with some trifling rearrangements which did not affect the total, in the Palace of Minos. The paucity of this list allowed for no more positive and precise conclusions than that the Cypriot script of the Bronze Age was in fact closely related to the Minoan and similar to the Classical Cypriot script. Yet Professor Persson and others on this slender basis made several attempts to transliterate Bronze Age inscriptions on the assumption that sufficient identities could be found between the Classical and the Bronze Age Cypriot syllabaries. These attempts I have discussed separately at the close of this paper.

Folk specialists in snake-lore may exercise their interests in several directions. They may seek out, detect, handle, and remove snakes; they may manipulate them for entertainment; they may possess, claim, or confer impunity in the handling of snakes and immunity to their venoms, and they may possess or claim special powers in the treatment of snake poisoning; finally they may train apprentices to these various ends. Such specialists (professional snake-charmers apart) are often persons endowed with supernatural power in other spheres of activity. They may be seyyids (descendants of the Prophet), fakirs, holy men, practitioners of folk-medicine, dervishes, sorcerers, or persons possessed of holiness or baraka for any reason. Common terms used of such people in Iraq are sheikh and seyyid.

Such specialists fall naturally into several groups. There are the frankly insane, the victims of dissociation and the subconscious; there are the ignorant simpletons who have so far been lucky, and to this category belong the conscientious but deluded religionists; there are the informed and quick-witted rogues who know their species and take care to handle the harmless snakes only, and lastly there are the genuine charmers, who have specialist knowledge and skill, who know their natural history and who handle poisonous species, over which they have obtained safe control either by the taming of familiarity and gentle handling or by extracting periodically their fangs, or venom, or both. The last group may also immunize themselves to specific venoms by inoculation. In Iraq the writer did not encounter or hear of any of this last type.

En se multipliant depuis une quinzaine d'années, les découvertes en Orient ont fait surgir en abondance des éléments de haute époque, qui incitent à reprendre le problème de l'origine de l'art minoen, tel qu'il s'est constitué au IIIe millénaire avant notre ère. Lors de ses premières découvertes à Cnosse, à partir de 1900, Sir Arthur Evans n'avait guère à sa disposition, pour établir des comparaisons dans un passé lointain, que la documentation égyptienne. Les remarquables découvertes, qui avaient tant surpris les égyptologues, de J. de Morgan, Fl. Petrie, Quibell, Reisner et autres, ouvraient la voie à des rapprochements entre le premier essor de l'art crétois et la civilisation déjà développée des temps prédynastiques et protodynastiques en Egypte, ce qu'on a appelé aussi la civilisation protolibyenne. Elle s'affirmait par l'art des palettes de schiste, par de beaux ivoires sculptés, des stèles royales, des vases finement taillés dans des pierres diverses, notamment ces bols en albâtre avec les curieux replis dits «à moustache», la technique de la glaçure, etc…Cependant, dès cette époque, en Egypte même, s'affirmait l'influence asiatique, qu'on a qualifiée d'influence sumérienne. Certes Sumer est à l'origine, mais ce mouvement, venu d'Asie, ne s'est répercuté jusqu'enÉgypte que par l'intermédiaire des Sémites. La langue égyptienne est un témoin certain de cette action, mais aussi tel monument comme le célèbre manche en ivoire du Gebel el Arak dont G. Bénédite, en le publiant, avait constaté qu'il n'avait pas de répondant dans l'art égyptien. Le motif du dieu, qu'on y voit, entre deux animaux affrontés peut remonter à un prototype sumérien, mais le costume du dieu est proprement sémitique. Ces mêmes Sémites sont apparus à Warka où ils chassent le lion à la lance et à l'arc — arme que les Sumériens abandonnent aux nomades et dont la flèche est armée d'un silex évasé qu'on retrouve sur les palettes de schiste égyptiennes.

In Old-Babylonian texts and notably in the Code of Ḫammu-rabi there is frequent mention of priests and priestesses of various classes and also of eunuchs and other specially privileged persons; amongst them there occurs the mysterious SAL-ZIKRUM ‘woman-man’, who has hitherto defied identification.

The term used to describe this person is obscure; for, while the first element in it is clearly Sumerian, the second element is prima facie a Babylonian word although it is treated as indeclinable, i.e. as a Sumerian rather than as a Babylonian term. In the Babylonian language only proper names are normally left undeclined. The only remaining possibility is that this second element is a pseudo-ideogram, i.e. a Babylonian term which has been treated after the analogy of the first element as a Sumerian word, though never incorporated into the Sumerian language; if this suggestion is correct, the component elements are the Sum. SAL ‘female’ and the Acc. zikarum or zikrumI ‘male’. Even the sex of the SAL-ZIKRUM is in doubt; for, while the word as it stands (at any rate, if ZIKRUM is Babylonian) is masculine in form, the preceding SAL is commonly put as the determinative prefix before feminine nouns; moreover, the whole complex is regularly construed as of the feminine gender.

Modern scientific archaeology in the Near East began with Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik on the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles, undertaken in the belief that the site of the Hellenistic and Roman town ‘New Ilion’ was also the site of Homer's ‘Troy’. His conviction that the city of Priam which Agamemnon burned was the second from the bottom in the sequence of nine major deposits, because that ‘Second City’ had also perished by fire, was replaced, immediately after his death in 1890, by the probability that the Sixth City, the importance of which he had overlooked, corresponded far more closely in date and character with the conditions of a Trojan War at the traditional date, about 1200 B.C.; and had in fact some intercourse with the peoples of the south Aegean during the late Minoan decline. But, this point gained, the excavation of Hissarlik was left unfinished, and the definitive publication of it, and of the Schliemann Collection in Berlin (both in 1902), showed, all too clearly, how much was still unknown, especially as to the date and character of the Sixth City.

It is not generally realized that the roller-moulded type of window-pane, so common in Italy and the western provinces of the Roman Empire from the first century A.D. onwards, was unknown, or at least extremely rare, in the East. Its place was taken, at least from the fourth century A.D. onwards, by circular panes of blown glass resembling very shallow dishes without a foot-ring. The rim is not plain, but is folded over outwards (a curious feature, presumably for added strength); the sides, normally about ½ to 1 mm. thick, are straight, and the bottom, usually 3 to 5 mm. thick, is bulbous, being flat or slightly concave externally. The average diameter is about 16 to 20 cm.