Only a few years ago scholarly attention was drawn to the area of Lake Tien (also called Lake Kun-ming) in Yunnan Province, where from a group of princely tombs at Shih-chai-shan a strikingly expressive Late Bronze Age culture came to light [I]. With the discovery, in a tomb untouched by later disturbances, of a golden seal bearing the Chinese inscription ‘Seal of the King of Tien’, it was evident beyond doubt that the spade had struck the cemetery of the royal household or clan of Tien.

Even without this find the ethnohistorical identification of the burial site would have been possible from its geographical situation (FIG. I). According to historical tradition, from the Late Chou period onward the fertile plain around the shores of Lake Tien was known to have been occupied by the people of Tien, who gave the lake its name. No reference is made in the earliest records to either the actual extension of Tien’s sphere of influence or the state of civilization it may have attained.

Silbury is the largest ancient man-made mound in Europe. It stands beside the Bath Road (A4) in north Wiltshire, about six miles west of Marlborough. It forms a regular truncated cone, with a flat top 100 ft. (30.5 m.) in diameter and 130 ft. (40 m.) high above the surrounding meadows. The base covers about 5.25 acres (2.1 hectares). A little below the top the profile is broken by a marked step or terrace; and there are traces of what may have been similar terraces lower down, on the north and east sides. It may be that the mound was built originally in the form of a stepped cone.

Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves-or desires. I lectured on this subject long ago. It always provoked cries of delight from a general audience when I contrasted pictures of the wildly jagged stones seen by romantic eyes with others showing the smooth stones and regular form of the Roman temple of the Tuscan order apparent to the classical vision. I ended my lecture with Stonehenge as it appeared to our scientific age-but I did not at that time dream that our greatest prehistoric monument would actually be taken over by astronomers and recognized as a celestial observatory and calculating machine.

Professor Hoyle's use of my Stonehenge findings is as intriguing as it is ingenious. As I said on the BBC-TV programme Chronicle last August, his support of my theory is most welcome, and his speculations deserve and will receive the most careful consideration.

The last four decades have seen marked changes of opinion about the chronology of the Neolithic. While at first a high dating for the Central European Neolithic was generally accepted, since the Second World War this has given way to a short chronology. With the help of archaeological stratigraphy and comparative methods of research it has been possible to determine anew the relative succession of the individual cultures, and to establish convincingly the temporal priority of those parts of South-eastern Europe adjacent to the Near East.

Time and again, at international gatherings of archaeologists, the language barrier topples at the touch of a pencil on the back of an envelope. There is already a universal visual language, because archaeological evidences exist in the same visual terms the world over. Translate such data into words, and not only are they removed one step further from reality but also their meaning is put internationally at risk. They have to be translated yet again, from one verbal language to another, by intermediaries whose knowledge and skill may be imperfect.

The inscribed clay tablets (PL. XVIa) found in a 'Neolithic' context at Tartaria (FIG. 1) in Romania in 1961 have already aroused a certain amount of interest here. The signs on the tablets are comparable with those of the script of the Late Predynastic (Uruk III Jemdet Nasr) period in Mesopotamia, as Dr Vlassa who excavated them has noted. It seems unlikely however that the tablets were drafted by a Sumerian hand or in the Sumerian language of early Mesopotamia. The shapes of the tablets and some of the signs are paralleled in the Minoan scripts of Crete, but the tablets do not seem to be Cretan. There are indications that a similar use of signs, if not actual writing, was practised in the rest of the Aegean and in Western Anatolia before the end of the 3rd millennium B.C. A knowledge of writing, or the use of signs derived from it, may have spread to these regions and to the Balkans from Mesopotamia through Syria. This was perhaps one aspect of a common inheritance of religious or magical beliefs and practices.

In the 15 years since the decipherment of the so-called ‘Linear B’ script as Greek, I have often been asked what was the most important resulting gain in our knowledge of ancient Greece. I have always put first the final and conclusive proof that the Mycenaeans, the people who produced a brilliant civilization in Greece between the 16th and 12th centuries BC, were Greeks. Previously there had always been room for argument, and although most people accepted this as a fact, it was always just possible to assert that the Mycenaeans were a non-Greek people, whose deeds and legends had been appropriated by the Greeks as their own.

Around 3100 B.C. the kingship of Egypt, a country probably united already for over a century, passed into the hands of a family which tradition states originated from the Thinite nome in Upper Egypt. At about the same time the keeping of written records was begun and these first historic kings have come to form what we know as the 1st Dynasty. This was clearly a crucial and momentous period for under their rule Egyptian civilization began to take on that peculiarly characteristic form which was to last so long. It is obviously a matter of some consequence to be able to locate the tombs of these kings but here archaeology has provided a puzzle. For two quite separate sites have been identified as the royal cemetery of the period [I].

Bampur is today a dusty, straggling village in Persian Baluchistan (FIG. I). Bounded by a variety of desert landscape, blackened gravel on one side, rolling dunes on the other, the Bampur river is its lifeline, providing perennial water and a narrow strip of fertile soil along its course. Hydrants, as yet uncoupled to pipes, stand in the main road as tangible evidence that the village is included in the regional development plans. Bampur has in fact passed through many vicissitudes and it has grown considerably since 1 9 3 2 when Sir Aurel Stein described it as a cluster of some 50 mat huts [I]. In Islamic and later times it was a political centre of some importance and its ascendance almost certainly had an earlier origin.

In 1954 a stone and timber-built mortuary house belonging to the Funnel-Beaker (TRB) culture was excavated at Tustrup, in the county of Randers in Eastern Jutland. At that time such structures were unknown in the area of the Funnel-Beaker culture, but, five years later, a very similar mortuary house was found at Ferslev, just south of the Limfjord, in the neighbouring county of Aalborg. From the archaeological evidence Tustrup dates from the very beginning of the period when Passage Graves (Jættestuer) were being built in Denmark. The structure and the ritual carried out in both the mortuary houses, as it could be deduced from the content and disposition of the grave goods, adds very considerably to our knowledge of the burial practices of the megalith builders of Denmark. Quite apart from this, the discoveries at Tustrup and Ferslev provide us with good fixed points in the relative and absolute chronology of the Funnel-Beaker culture since each house contained a large number of highly ornamented pots as well as charcoal from the walls and roofs of the houses, which could be dated by the C14 method.

The extraordinary rapidity of the Arab conquest (FIG. 1) of the north African coastlands between Alexandria and Tripoli has often evoked comment, even in an age which has seen modern armies advancing still more rapidly over the same route. One recent writer, exceptionally well qualified to discuss Arab warfare, has affirmed that ‘the welcome offered to the Arabs in the Western Desert and Barqa seems to suggest that the people in this area were themselves partly Arab’.