Many scholars emphasize the Soviet Union's invasion of Lithuania in 1940 as the first traumatic event in Marija Gimbutas'life, but she was exposed to conflict from the time of her birth. She was born in Vilnius, a city that was at the root of conflict between Lithuanians and Poles during the 1920s and 1930s. It is unclear why she created an image of a peaceful ‘Goddess-oriented Old Europe’, as her life was inseparable from various ethnic and ideological conflicts of 20th-century Europe.

Most of the opposition directed at the new AcropolisMuseum (herafter NAM), both beforeand since its opening in June 2009, has turned out to be politically motivated, mainly from the Left in Greece, mainly from the Right in Britain (the Daily Telegraph called it 'a hideous visitor centre in modern Athens'before it was even built [Wilson 2006]). Dimitris Plantzos comes at the museum from a different angle, but he too is determinedly on the attack. A first sign of this is his total silence about the protection and exhibition of the archaeological site underlying the museum, one of its major positive (and innovatory) features.

Ever since the beginning of recorded history, Ancient Egypt was dependent upon the goodwill of the Phoenician overlords of the mountain land of the Lebanon for supplies of timber in the long running lengths required for the construction of large ships, especially those intended for use on long voyages by sea ; fine timber was also in considerable demand for the making of the elaborate wooden sarcophagi of nobles and of members of the royal family as well as for furniture of superior quality. This lack of suitable native timber made the Egyptians late comers in sea-trading ; indeed, it restricted progress so seriously that their water-borne commerce was limited to traffic with Nubia and the South by way of the Nile waterway, to occasional expeditions down the Red Sea to Southern Arabia and to Somaliland (Punt) and to short coasting trips to Phoenicia to buy timber logs and to the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula in search of copper.

1. In the September number of ANTIQUITY (no. 123, pp. 124–130), I suggested that the language of Linear A was Semitic. I leaned toward narrowing down the probabilities to West Semitic, but indicated the possibility of East Semitic (= Akkadian or Assyro-Babylonian) too. The clue to the identification of the language proved to be ga-ba MAN 62 (= Akkadian gabba awîlū 62) ‘ all the men = 62 ’ (p. 128, n. 14aa). Subsequently I observed that the regular Mycenaean Greek totalling formula (e.g. to-so MAN 17 ‘ so many men: 17 ’) was as exact an equivalent of my Akkadian reading as one could expect in so different an idiom. From that moment on I approached Linear A with Akkadian in mind.

Mr Jack Hanbury-Tenison is a Field Director of the University of Sydney excavations at Pella, and has combined this with doing surveys of his own in Jordan to pick up settlement patterns in the fourth millennium. In writing a thesis on the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze I transition in Palestine and Transjordan he says he is trying to steer a course between the anti-empiricism of the New Archaeology and the positivism of the Kenyon school. He says, engagingly, that ‘what got me on to Hegel and Darwin was wondering where people got their loopy ideas from’. This essay is a plea for commonsense, and an understanding of how pastoralists use the landscape today. Hanbury-Tenison is a research student of Magdalen College, Oxford.