The land known by the name of Dilmun (or Telmun) in the cuneiform documents has been identified by most scholars with the island of Bahrein in the Persian T Gulf (note 1), and for the past nine years a large and competent Danish expedition has been excavating on the island in the hope of uncovering there the origin of the Sumerians and their civilization (note 2). Several scholars have located Dilmun in Iran, south of Elam, and have taken it to be a land bordering on the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, whose hinterland included the province of Persis (note 3). This was the localization of Dilmun which seemed most likely to me when preparing the article 'Dilmun and the Land of the Living' some two decades ago (note 4). In recent years, however, new inscriptional material has become available which indicates that whatever its western boundary, Dilmun extended much farther to the east and included much, if not all, of that part of Iran, Pakistan, and India on which flourished the Indus or Harappan civilization (note 5). The following pages will sketch the pertinent cuneiform evidence for this identification of Dilmun in the chronological order in which it came to my attention over the years.

The interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls propagated by the overwhelming majority of Scrolls scholars start with the assumption that the Scrolls are not later than the second half of the first Christian century—more precisely, not later than June, A.D. 68—the only exceptions being those of one or two scholars who prefer a slightly later date. The exact terminus ad quem is not, however, based on any evidence contained in the Scrolls themselves, but was propounded by Père de Vaux as a conclusion derived from his excavations of the Qumran building and was taken over from him by the Scrolls scholars.

Professor Hawkes’s important article on ‘The British Museum and British Archaeology’ in the December number of ANTIQUITY is based on an intimate knowledge of the Museum and a sympathetic understanding of the disabilities which have beset it since the war. It may be that he is not fully aware of the changes in work and tempo that have markedly developed since he himself left the staff in 1946, but we know well that his article reflects a widespread impatience to see an end of the disabilities and the problems which have developed as the direct result of the war; and above all to see created in the National Museum an organization for dealing with British archaeology and antiquities which will be equal to the great advance of the subject that has taken place in this century, and with dramatic acceleration in the post-war years. No one is keener to see this development than the staff of the Department of British Antiquities who are entirely alive to what is required. We fully recognize, therefore, the importance of what Professor Hawkes has to say, but he does seem to be in some danger of falling into the mistake that many other less well-informed and less well-intentioned critics have made—of assuming that the honourable scars which still disfigure the British Museum and the overcrowding which was the inevitable concomitant of an informed and successful collecting policy in the Museum’s many departments, are being complacently lived with and that nothing has been done to bring about the speedy disappearance of these obstacles to our service.

In 1931 Dr O. G. S. Crawford published his survey of the Chiltern Grim’s Ditch in ANTIQUITY, and in the following issue Mr M. W. Hughes related it to Cuthwulf’s expedition to the Chilterns in A.D. 571. It is my intention in this paper to show that Mr Hughes had no evidence for so dating the earthwork and to demonstrate that it most probably belongs to the Iron Age. Closer study on the ground has shown that it is cut by two Roman roads, and is more extensive than Crawford realized, although he had credited it with a Berkhampstead section that cannot belong to it. The only question which really remains to be considered is whether the Ditch belongs to the Belgic Iron Age, since the Belgae are known to have dug cross-country dykes, or to the pre-Belgic Iron Age, since I have recently assigned this date to a number of cross-ridge dykes not far away in the eastern Chilterns.