Part III. Catalogue

Iraq ◽  
1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-259
Author(s):  
M. E. L. Mallowan

At the end of each successive season, the collections of antiquities discovered at Brak and Chagar Bazar were divided into two parts, one of which was allotted to the Aleppo Museum, Syria, the other to the Expedition. The Aleppo Museum had the priority of selection. Any object marked (S) in the Catalogue was allocated to Aleppo. Of the remainder, the majority of the objects are in the British Museum, London, and smaller collections of antiquities were also sent to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and to the Museum of Archæology and Ethnology, Cambridge. A representative collection of potsherds, a few complete pots, and some of the Eye-Idols were also sent to the London Institute of Archæology.All of the most important objects discovered by the Expedition have been illustrated in the eighty-six Plates of this final publication, or in previous numbers of Iraq. The Eye-Idols and the Golden Frieze from the Eye-Temple have been illustrated in colour in the Illustrated London News, in which short preliminary accounts of each season's work have been published; but obviously the information contained in those articles was only a very brief summary, and in many cases has been modified by subsequent discoveries.

1912 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Edwards

The compilation of the following key has been a matter of no little difficulty, mainly owing to the close connection of the species in some of the groups, which sometimes makes it almost impossible to assign specific limits. The difficulty has in some cases been increased through the paucity of material, which prevents any adequate conception of the range of variability being obtained. This is particularly the case with some of the species coming from the Mediterranean region, which are very closely allied, and of which, as a rule, the British Museum possesses very few specimens. Names have only been sunk here as synonyms in those cases where there appeared to be no reasonable doubt, either after a comparison of the types, or of the descriptions, when these were sufficiently detailed. Eventually, therefore, it may be found that some forms which are here given specific rank will have to be regarded at most as varieties. Since so many figures of Anopheline wings, etc., have already appeared, it is not deemed necessary to add to their number. Some new records have been included, but on the other hand some old ones, which appeared to be questionable, have been omitted. As with the writer's previous papers, this key is merely intended to supplement the detailed descriptions which will be found in other works.


1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-112
Author(s):  
W. M. Edwards

In making the following suggestions I have assumed the chronological possibility of allusions in the Aetia Prologue on the one hand to the quarrel with Apollonius Rhodius, and on the other to Arsinoe II. (obiit 271–270 B.C.). That such a combination is possible is maintained by Rostagni in Rivista di Filologia, 1928, pp. 1 sqq. The textual supplements offered here, while intended to support the double hypothesis, differ from his in some points; notably in regard to the question of where the allusion to Arsinoe is to be introduced into the text of Callimachus (see below). It need hardly be said that the supposed allusions to the queen and to the rival poet do not necessarily stand or fall together. In the case of the former it might not be altogether incredible (pace R.) that such an allusion should have been made after her death; whilst the most obvious consequence in regard to Apollonius would be that, if a date before 270 B.C. be accepted for the Prologue, his birth would have to be placed as early as possible—say, 295–290 B.C. However this may be, it is here sought to complete, in the above sense, certain passages in the Prologue (P.) with the aid of the British Museum Scholiast (S.). In regard to the latter a fresh study of the original text by the editor (Mr. H. J. M. Milne) has been utilized, to say nothing of his valuable suggestions and criticisms; in the case of P. the facsimile in Ox. Pap. XVII. is depended upon. The silence of S. on some of the supposed points may fairly be adduced in objection to them; but it may be noted that he does not comment on Πυγμαίων (P. 14), and that his exposition, where it can be checked, seems to be somewhat hasty and unbalanced. Further, we do not know what may have preceded the portion of his work which has survived.


1930 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. T. Tams

Of the four moths dealt with in this paper, three are known to damage coconut palms in Celebes, and the fourth behaves similarly in the Gold Coast. Three of the species are here described as new. The opportunity has been taken to figure the larvae as well as the imagines of the Celebes species, and to include figures of Orthocraspeda catenatus, Snellen, of which two larvae and a pair of imagines were received with the other Celebes material. The short descriptions of the larvae are taken, with slight modifications, from Mr. A. Reyne's letter which accompanied the specimens. All the material concerned has been generously presented to the British Museum (Natural History) by the Director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology.


Parasitology ◽  
1921 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. A. Baylis

A Re-Examination of the type-specimens of “Sclerostoma” clathratum Baird from the African elephant, which are in the British Museum, has led to a rather interesting discovery. The material was contained in two bottles, labelled in Baird's own handwriting. One bore the name “Sclerostoma clathratum Baird,” and contained a single male specimen of the form now known as Grammocephalus clathratus. The other bottle was labelled “Sclerostoma clathratum Baird, ♀,” and proved to contain worms of both sexes and of quite a different type from Grammocephalus.


The hour lines on the sundials of the ancient Greeks and Romans correspond to the division of the time between sun rise and sun-set into twelve equal parts, which was their mode of computing time. An example of these hour lines occurs in an ancient Greek sundial, forming part of the Elgin collection of marbles at the British Museum, and which there is reason to believe had been constructed during the reign of the Antonines. This dial contains the twelve hour lines drawn on two vertical planes, which are inclined to each other at an angle of 106°; the line bisecting that angle having been in the meridian. The hour lines actually traced on the dial consist of such portions only as were requisite for the purpose the dial was intended to serve: and these portions are sensibly straight lines. But the author has shown, in a paper published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that if these lines are continued through the whole zone of the rising and setting semidiurnal arcs, they will be found to be curves of double curvature on the sphere. In the present paper the author enters into an investigation of the course of these curves; first selecting as an example the lines indicating the 3rd and the 9th hours of the ancients. These lines are formed by the points of bisection of all the rising and setting semidiurnal arcs; commencing from the southern point where the meridian cuts the horizon, and proceeding till the line reaches to the first of the always apparent parallels, which, being a complete circle, it meets at the end of its first quadrant. At this point the branch of another and similar curve is continuous with it: namely, a curve which in its course bisects another set of semidiurnal arcs, belonging to a place situated on the same parallel of latitude as the first, but distant from it 180° in longitude. Continuing to trace the course of this curve, along its different branches, we find it at last returning into itself, the whole curve being characterized by four points of flexure. If the describing point be considered as the extremity of a radius, it will be found that this radius has described, in its revolution, a conical surface with two opposite undulations above, and two below the equator. The right section of this cone presents two opposite hyperbolas between asymptotes which cross one another at right angles This cone varies in its breadth in different positions of the sphere; diminishing as the latitude of the place increases. The cones to which the other ancient hour lines belong, are of the same description, having undulations alternately above and below the equator; but they differ from one another in the number of the undulations: and some of these require more than one revolution to complete their surface. The properties of the cones and lines thus generated, may be rendered evident by drawing the sections of the cones on the sphere, in perspective, either on a cylindrical or on a plane surface: several examples of which are given in the paper.


1986 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 58-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Griffiths

The British Museum possesses, and displays as a group, three elegant white-ground kylikes potted around the middle of the fifth century by Sotades, and painted by that skilled, inventive and intelligent miniaturist dubbed by Beazley ‘The Sotades Painter’. First impressions suggest, and further investigation confirms, that the three make up a coherent set, designed and executed according to a pre-conceived plan. This paper will have something to say about the nature of that plan, but most of it will necessarily be occupied with a prior, and fundamental, problem: for the dramatic and very individual scene illustrated on one of the cups has so far resisted all attempts at interpretation, and I have a new proposal to make. The acid test of that identification will be whether it turns out to form an appropriately complementary element to the other two scenes, and whether all three taken together make sense as a mid-fifth century cultural ensemble.


1932 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-846
Author(s):  
Lionel Giles

The Stein Collection of MSS. from Tun–huang at the British Museum, so rich in other respects, includes very few documents of a purely topographical nature. The two most interesting texts belonging to this class are the Tun huang lu (S. 5448), which was published with translation and notes in the JRAS. for July, 1914, and the present roll (S. 367), which is unfortunately imperfect at the beginning and lacks a title. The Tun huang lu deals with the district immediately surrounding Tun-huang itself, but the other treatise goes farther afield, and follows the “ southern route ” as far as Charchan, after which it doubles back to the oasis of Hāmi and the neighbouring territory. If Sha Chou was the starting-point, it is not likely that much has been lost at the beginning, since the first paragraphs are concerned with the Nan-hu oasis, which is only some 30 miles distant from that centre.


1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Sharp

In 1964, Mr Peter Laslett drew attention to a discovery of some importance to Harrington scholars. Professor Gilbert Gilchrist, according to Laslett's report, had found ‘a manuscript version of an early part of Oceana… which may have been written well before the book appeared in 1656; indeed before the Commonwealth began’. The manuscript lay in the British Museum. Since Gilchrist's original discovery – really rediscovery, for the staff of the museum had indexed the manuscript under ‘Harrington’ – two more manuscript versions of Oceana have been unearthed, one of them in the British Museum, the other in the Bodleian. All three manuscripts are very much the same, and all seem candidates for Laslett's description as manuscript versions of Oceana written well before the publication of Harrington's printed book in 1656. Unfortunately Mr Laslett's understandable optimism is almost certainly misplaced, for the manuscripts seem much more likely to have been subsequent extracts from Oceana, taken probably in the 1690s. So much for our hopes of observing Harrington's mind working at early drafts of Oceana. But something, too, is gained. The striking differences which gave Laslett his grounds for thinking Gilchrist's manuscript to be an early version of Oceana turn out, in fact, to represent a fascinating exercise in late seventeenth-century domestication of Harrington by his interpreters. The manuscripts show how Harrington, a supporter of revolution, was made a conservative.


1891 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-475
Author(s):  
S. Arthur Strong

The following inscription is engraved (lines 1 to 49) on the back and (lines 50 to 81) on the left side of a stele of reddish stone brought from Babylon by Mr. Rassam, and now in the British Museum. The stele is rounded at the top, and on the face Aššurbanipal is represented in high relief in his tiara and royal robes, supporting on his head with his two hands an object which looks like a basket of woven reeds. The meaning of this attitude has been discussed in a learned paper by Mr. Evetts, and his conclusion is that the king is represented “in his capacity as priest carrying the instruments of sacrifice” (P.S.B.A. 1891). In the inscription the king, after setting forth his glory and titles, goes on to record how that he completed the work of restoration and adornment, which Esarhaddon his father had begun in Êsagila and the other temples of Babylon, that he brought back the image of Marduk, which in the reign of a former king (Sennacherib) had been carried away to Assyria, that he reorganized the public worship and other internal affairs of Babylon, and established his brother Šamaššumukin on the throne.


1988 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 315-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Ashton

In the summer of 1978 pottery and flintwork were noticed in the sections to the south of Cliffe Village during the laying of a pipeline by British Gas (TQ 734744) (fig. 1). This led to the excavation of a series of small trial trenches by Mr David Thomson with the help of local volunteers in the same year. The retrieval of a Beaker and Collared Urn suggested an early Bronze Age site, and excavations by Dr Ian Kinnes for the British Museum were done in September 1979. Although the excavated features contained mainly Iron Age pottery and metalwork, both seasons' work also produced a large quantity of flint artefacts ranging from Mesolithic to Bronze Age in date. The following report is an analysis of the Mesolithic tranchet axe manufacturing debitage which could be distinguished as a discrete group from the other flintwork. It is not intended to present a comprehensive flint report for Cliffe, but to provide a framework for analysis at other sites where tranchet axe production has been shown to take place (Wymer 1962; Parfitt and Halliwell 1982).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document