group of ruins comprising a monastery and a palace, Ḳasr ibn Wardān, has only recently been discovered. The church in Isauria described by Dr A. C. Headlam is now famous as a step in development. Later researches by Sir William Ramsay and Miss Bell, and the German excavations at Priene, Miletus and Ephesus, have brought to light an immense body of new material. Syria is crowded with ruined churches, many of which were built in the great sixth century. A well-equipped American expedition, which lately worked over the ground, has added greatly to our knowledge of the period. Still further east in Mesopotamia and Armenia there are many interesting buildings, some of which are still used for Christian worship. In Egypt and the Sūdān the Christian ruins are at last receiving attention, and an Austrian expedition has excavated the convent of St Menas near Alexandria. The excavations at Bawit and Saḳḳara have brought to light a wonderful series of capitals and other sculptured stones. Many of these seem to be prototypes of forms well known in Constantinople and Ravenna. One or two second-rate capitals of this kind have recently been added to the British Museum, but the best have gone to Berlin, where there is a very fine collection of Christian art, and to Boston. To the age of Justinian belong the monastery and church of St Catherine under Mount Sinai, where still as when Procopius wrote, "monks dwell whose life is only a careful study of death." It is a compact square fort surrounded by high walls, within which is a large church half filling up the space, the rest being occupied by a few narrow lanes of small dwellings. The Egyptian monasteries are of this type, and that of Sinai was doubtless built by masters from Egypt. The plan of the church has an Egyptian characteristic in a chapel across the east end outside the apse. The church is basilican with granite columns and a wooden roof. On the old timbers were found three inscriptions, which shewed that the monastery was finished between 548 and 562. In the apse is a much injured mosaic of the Transfiguration which is probably of the age of the church. Besides the celebrated enamelled door, which probably dates from the eleventh century, are some carved wooden doors, which De Beylié thinks belonged to the original work. The inscriptions spoken of above mention Justinian, "our defunct empress Theodora," and Ailisios the architect.
During the last generation an enormous body of evidence for Christian art in North Africa has been recorded by French scholars. One of the latest discoveries is a beautiful baptistery at Timgad, which had the floor and the basin of the font with its curb-wall continuously covered with mosaic. It may be mentioned here that parts of a mosaic floor, from what must have been a baptistery at Carthage, are now in the British Museum. This shews a stag and a hind drinking from the waters of paradise, recalling the verse: "As the hart panteth after the water brooks."
On the shores of the Adriatic and in Italy are many pure Byzantine
