Sir Mortimer Wheeler has made innumerable contributions to the archaeology of the Roman period in Britain, and in his inaugural lecture as Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces he declared his faith in training in Romano–British archaeology as the best training for would-be excavators, a faith to which I emphatically adhere. When he extended his field to India, he sought for and found datable products from Rome, Arretine ware, to provide a hitherto completely lacking fixed point in chronology, by means of which he established a chronological framework for much of the 1st millennium b.c. in the Indian sub-continent. Between Britain and India lies Palestine. Probably not many people know how nearly Sir Mortimer went to Palestine c. 1936, as Director of Antiquities. Political events made it impossible, but he has maintained his interest in this area. It seems not inappropriate to offer an article on the Roman impact on Palestine to this volume in his honour.

This year on the eve of his 80th birthday, which we now celebrate, Sir Mortimer Wheeler has been responsible for drafting the report on the UNESCO Mission to Mohenjo Daro. No honour could be better deserved, or give him greater satisfaction, than the implementation of the important and judicious recommendations on which he and his colleagues have agreed for the conservation of this world-famous site and, complementary to this, for its excavation down to the deeply waterlogged levels. For all who are aware of the massive remains of superimposed architecture which still adorns Mohenjo Daro it is staggering to learn that even below the present average flood-plain level “recent borings have shown at more than one spot that brickwork in fact goes down as much as 60 feet (18 m.)”. A combination of international skills, engineering, hydrological, and archaeological, are available to encompass that great task, which is one that deserves the large funds required. Moreover the lessons which would be learned from the application of the practical techniques would be directly relevant to the opening and exploration of world-famous ancient sites in the great alluvial valleys of Western Asia—Nile and Tigris, Euphrates and Ganges as well as the Indus.

This copy (dated 714/1314), which is now on indefinite loan to the British Museum, is perhaps the best known of our illustrated manuscripts. It is one of the few surviving remnants of the vast historical project set in motion by the Ilkhānid wazīr Rashīd al-Dīn Faẓl Allāh (d. 718/1318), and in its present form consists of fragments of the second volume of the Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh in the Arabic version, amounting to 60 folios, viz.:—

(1) Fragments of the History of the Prophet and his Companions (fol. 2a–9a).

a well-known find of a vehicle-model in the Indus civilization is the fragmentary copper representation of a covered cart found at a depth of 10 feet 6 inches in Stratum IV of Mound F at Harappā (Vats 1940, I, 99, 452; II, Pl. CXXV, 35), illustrated here by a drawing made from the original in 1943 (Fig. 1). It has a virtually exact counterpart from Chanhu-dāro (Mackay 1943, Pl. LVIII, 2) which, however, lacks not only the draught animals but the figure of the driver. The Harappā model clearly shows that in its unbroken condition it had a central draught-pole, with model animals projecting from the body of the cart on rods, the broken stumps of which look for a moment deceptively like an anachronistic pair of shafts. Both models would originally have possessed a pair of wheels carried on an axle turning in the loops below the vehicle.

The student of Persian painting normally approaches manuscripts of Qazwīnī's “Marvels of Creation” (‘Ajā’ib al-Makhlūqāt) with a certain wary apprehension. Copies of the work generally contain a very large number of miniatures, and thus tend to suffer, like some manuscripts of the Shāhnāma, from “painter's fatigue”—in other words the standard of painting deteriorates as the manuscript proceeds, as if the artist, who may have started off with a fine flourish, found himself, after the first hundred or so miniatures, physically wilting and mentally inert. This is, of course, only human, considering that he was required to produce small and stereotyped illustrations of an interminable series of angels, constellations, beasts, birds, insects, trees, and plants. But it means that copies of the “Marvels of Creation” of first-rate quality are exceedingly rare. The present manuscript, though not in the top flight, may be assigned a very respectable place in the second rank, and has in addition one or two other characteristics that make it a more interesting subject of study than the majority of Qazwīnī manuscripts.

The most familiar techniques of the Chinese silversmith in the T‘ang period are chasing, punching, and repoussé. Openwork is not infrequent, but the spherical censers with ajouré ornament over the whole of their surface, the bowl covers and hairpins treated in this fashion, do not belong to the most refined products or the most original designs of the T‘ang masters. The two pieces described in this article use openwork in a different way, as the overlay of a solid ground. The delicacy of the ornament and some of the technical features are exceptional.