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 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.

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’.

Lefkandi in Euboea, possibly the site of the Homeric Eretria, was again the scene of the School's principal excavations. In a summer and an autumn campaign, in the first of which Mr L. H. Sackett participated, Mr M. R. Popham, Assistant Director, aided by many of the students, completed the present programme. The initial Early Helladic levels were reached in a substantial area and the succeeding occupations down to the abandonment of the site in the late 8th century B.C. were greatly clarified.