An enquiry which seemed simple enough at the outset, has developed alarmingly in the course of investigation and now covers a wide field which can only be briefly indicated in this note. It concerns seven ornaments in all, two of which have long been in the possession of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden; the other five were excavated by Sir Flinders Petrie and his staff for the British School of Egyptian Archaeology at Tell el-Ajjul, south of Gaza, between 1930–52, and are now dispersed in various museums (see Fig. 1 and Plates XXI–XXII).

From the time of discovery onwards, the bird represented on the Ajjul ornaments was described as a falcon, and there seemed no reason to question it. But many years later, Miss Sylvia Benton suggested to me – on seeing the Ajjul gold ornaments – that the craftsman intended to represent a wryneck jynx torquilla. It is only recently that I have had the opportunity to explore the possibility further. This paper is the result of that enquiry. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that the bird portrayed on Tutankhamen's earrings is the same bird as on the examples found at Tell el-Ajjul, whatever that may prove to be. The authors of the catalogues accompanying the exhibition of these treasures on view in Paris (1967) and in London (1972) did not commit themselves as to the identity of the bird.

In 1889 Petrie discovered and cleared a tomb at Kahun in the Fayum, Egypt. It contained a succession of burials in coffins and boxes which had not been disturbed after the final interment. Principally on the evidence of a large collection of beads, Petrie dated the use of the tomb to the Nineteenth-Twentieth Dynasties. This was queried by von Bissing, and after reconsidering the finds, Petrie decided that the tomb has been used during the reign of Tuthmosis III (1504– 1450 B.C.). Since then the tomb has usually been referred to as approximately or possibly of the reign of Tuthmosis III, and in his study of the sixteen Cypriote pots from the tomb Merrillees says there can be no doubt that all the interments were made during the reign ofthat pharaoh.

The aim of this paper is to establish as closely as possible the period of the use of the tomb, and to place in its context a small Mycenaean IIB squat jar, the only Aegean object found in the tomb.

When Professor Garstang excavated part of the Middle-Late Bronze Age Necropolis at Jericho between the years 1930–1936, he made special mention in one of his reports of a scarab in a group of six from Tomb 13 (LAAA., XX 1933, pp. 36–7 and Fig. 11). He described it briefly as follows:—

“Figure of a Canaanite wearing robe and cap with Syro-Hyksos hieroglyphs in the field.”

Twenty years have elapsed since then, and other scarabs have come to light which show figures wearing the same type of dress, so that it does seem worth while to assemble them on one page to see if they form a consistent and instructive group.