It may seem surprising that, after three-quarters of a century of excavation in Egypt, anyone should still feel it necessary to write an article claiming that ancient Egypt has, after all, left behind stratified town sites of the sort that have been the main source of work for the archaeoIogist in other countries ; and that, furthermore, the life which they represent can be rationally comprehended.

Some 300 years ago, in 1676, the year of Sir John Clerk‘s birth, Roger North, the biographer, visited Hadrian’s Wall. He was disappointed with what he saw: ‘it appeared only as a range or bank of stones all overgrown with grass, not unlike the bank of the Devil’s Ditch at Newmarket, only without any hollow, and nothing near so big’ (Birley, 1961, 9). In 1754, the year before Clerk died, William Stukeley had an audience of the Princess Dowager of Wales at Kew House.

Dr Szabó, who is on the staff of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts, is by training a classical archaeologist and art historian. In recent years he has been concerned with a re-evaluation of eastern Celtic art and is one of the editors of the great new Corpus of Celtic Material in Hungary being prepared under the auspices of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The text of Dr Szabó's paper was first delivered to the Vth International Celtic Congress held in Penzance in April 1975.

Less than ten years have passed since the first discovery in Saudi Arabia of prehistoric pottery superficially identical with that known from the earliest farming settlements in Sumer 6-700 km to the north. Some 40 sites have now been identified in the Eastern Province. More recently comparable pottery has been found at sites in nearby Qatar and Bahrain. These discoveries have provoked much speculation about the nature of the contact between Sumer and Arabia at this early period (on calibrated radiocarbon determinations by the late sixth millennium BC), and indeed on the origins of the people who created the important and distinctive prehistoric culture characterized by this pottery and known to archaeologists as ‘Ubaid.