Anatolia they probably found the land at least as far W. as the Halys already occupied by Semites. This Semitic population in Anatolia is an important recent discovery. At the time of the great dynasty of Ur (c. 2400 B.C.) in Babylonia, the whole Argaeus region was occupied by these Semites, who seem to have been most kin to the Assyrians. They were no doubt ex- pelled or absorbed by the Hittites, but we have the proof of their existence and of the fallacy of the statement that the Semite never crossed the Taurus, in the cuneiform tablets written in their language which have been found near Kaisariyeh and are now being published by various scholars. 10 No doubt the Hittites learnt the use of cuneiform from these people. Whether the national hieroglyphic system of the Hittites expressed the same Indo-European language as, according to Hrozny, their cuneiform does, we do not know, as further attempts to elucidate it made by Campbell Thompson u and Cowley, 12 while in them- selves very interesting experiments, do not seem to take us further than previous attempts by Sayce and others. The sup- position that the hieroglyphic system belongs to a late age, be- cause it is chiefly found in the loth and gth century monuments of Carchemish, is improbable, as it bears all the characteristic marks of Hethitic nationalism, and is evidently a native in- vention. No people would have abandoned cuneiform for such a clumsy method of writing.
The excavation of Carchemish, lately suspended owing to political uncertainty in Syria, has been very interesting. The palace with its great relief-lined court and its water-gate of Hittite construction, the later Assyrian fortress, and the Hittite tombs with their characteristic pottery, are important results, and the whole work has been one of the major excavations of the last ten years, and has been fitly carried out by the British Museum, under the direction of Dr. Hogarth and Mr. Woolley. 13 The excavations of Dr. Garstang for the university of Liver- pool at Sakchegozii, 14 further N., not far from Sinjirli, the seat of earlier German work, have also produced interesting results. The peculiar characteristics of Syro-Hittite art, and its relation to that of Assyria, are matters of great interest to the student of the civilization and art of the Nearer East. Equally interesting are the relation of the Syro-Hittite with the Minoan, and we seem to find in certain objects found in Egypt and Cyprus and dating probably from the I4th to the loth centuries, proof of the existence of a mixed art of Syrian origin, probably in Cilicia (Alashiya) at that time. 15 Baron Oppenheim's excavations at Tell Halaf have resulted in the recovery of reliefs of barbaric style, simulating the Syro-Hittite, from the palace of a local king, Kapara, of about the same period as Sinjirli and Sak- chegozii (icth-gth centuries B.C.), and pottery of all ages, going back to the chalcolithic period. 16
The neolithic and chalcolithic pottery of Mesopotamia and Persia is one of the chief archaeological discoveries of late years in the Near East, and attention has recently been directed to it again by the important finds at Abu Shahrein (the ancient Eridu) and Tell el 'Obeid, near Ur. The excavations carried out for the British Museum at Shahrein by R. C. Thompson in 1918 " and by Hall in 1919, and at El 'Obeid by Hall in the latter year, 18 have shown us that the painted ware of Susa and Musyan, discovered by de Morgan was not confined to Persia, but was the ordinary pottery of Babylonia in the prehistoric (chalcolithic) period. It seems characteristic of the neighbourhood of the gulf; the French excavations at Bandar Bushir 19 on the Persian coast have revealed exactly similar ware. And small finds of it on other sites have shown that it was usual all over Mesopotamia, and connects on the one side with the early pot fabrics of Asia Minor and on the other with the pottery of Anau and the kurgans of Turkistan, found by Pumpelly. 20 Its place of origin is not yet known. Rostortzeff in his article drawing attention to the undoubtedly Sumerian or sumerizing " Treasure of Astrabad " 21 in N. Persia (which, it must not be forgotten, may have been an importation from Babylonia and not local art at all), seems to think a northern origin as probable as any other. But as a matter of fact an exclusively Elamite origin is not improbable, from the fact that its earliest and first types are
found at Susa. Whether we should deduce from its common occurrence in Babylonia the existence of an Elamite population there in early times, later displaced by the Sumerians, we do not know. Sumerian pottery is different, but there are traces of a transition period. One thing, however, is pretty certain, and that is that the enormous dates B.C. assigned to it by de Mor- gan and Pumpelly cannot be accepted.
An argument for discontinuity of race is found in the fact that whereas the Sumerians are nevef represented as using the bow, their predecessors certainly made flint arrowheads. The stone knives, arrowheads, celts, hoe-blades, hammers, nails, awls, etc., associated with this pottery are of kinds which though simple and often crude in type are nevertheless not early, but date from the transition period to the age of metal and the earliest centuries of the latter period. Flint and chert were employed for knives, etc., but with none of the marvellous skill and artistry of the predynastic Egyptian flint-knapper; the early Babylonian used comparatively simple flakes and the wonderful serration of the Egyptian knives was unknown to him though he made the saw-blades. Obsidian and rock crystal were also used for knife making. Celts, of the usual late neolithic type, were generally of green jasper; hoe-blades (looking almost exactly like palaeolithic haches d main) of chert or coarse limestone; hammers of granite; mace-heads, of identical type with the early Egyptian, of diorite and limestone; nails of obsidian or smoky quartz, often beau- tifully made. All these stones were of course imported, as the Babylonian had no stone (except a rough coral rag) at hand as the Egyptian had. And many must have come from far afield. In later days, in the time of the Sargonid kings of Akkad or the monarchs of Ur, stones such as granite, basalt, diorite and dolerite were probably brought from the Sinaitic peninsula, if not from the western desert of Egypt, if the Red Sea coast is to be identified, as seems very probable, with Magan, " the place to which ships went," the land whence the Babylonians got some of their first stones for sculpture and architecture. Magan originally was probably a land on the S. coast of the Persian Gulf, but as the early navigators pushed their voyages further, the ships rounded the coast of Arabia, and came into the Red Sea, and the names of Magan and the neighbouring Melukhkha gradually extended westward, with the result that in late times to the Assyrians Melukhkha meant Ethiopia. Magan, however, probably never meant Egypt proper, the Nile land itself, or Egypt, would have been called Magan by the Assyrians in later times; it was called Musri then and probably in early times also. So that we are not disposed to accept a recently pro- pounded theory 22 that a certain King Manium of Magan who was overthrown by the Akkadian king Naram-Sin about 2850 B.C., was none other than Menes, the earliest king of Egypt, who is generally identified with Narmerza. " Manium " is a common Semitic name. We need not even suppose that this Manium was a chief of the Egyptian Red Sea coast or even of Sinai. The Magan of which he was king need have been no fur- ther afield than the Oman peninsula. And the whole equation seems to break down on the matter of date, as it is quite im- possible to bring Narmerza down to 2850 B.C. Naram-Sin was in reality a contemporary of the kings of the V. dynasty.
The question how far connexion was kept up between early Egypt and Babylonia by way of the Red Sea or across the desert is a very interesting one. An important piece of evidence on this point has recently come to light in the shape of the carved hippo- potamus-tusk handle of an Egyptian predynastic stone knife, said to have been found in the Wadi el "Araq, on the right bank of the Nile opposite Nag'Hamadi, and now in the Louvre. 23 On this remarkable object, which is certainly of predynastic Egyptian date (before 3500 B.C.), we see representations of early Egyptians and perhaps other tribes fighting, with ships, some like those represented on the Egyptian predynastic pots and others different, with high prows and sterns, and we also see a strange deity of Babylonian aspect. He is not identical with any known Babylonian deity, but he is the god of a people belonging to the Babylonian culture circle, probably of the inhabitants of the Red Sea littoral. The object is of Egyptian
