Abstract
AMONG the accessions to the collections of the British Museum (Bloomsbury) announced in December are a number of antiquities from the Near East and Egypt. Of these, among the more noteworthy are those obtained by Mr. M. E. L. Mallowan's excavations of last season on sites in northern Syria. Clay tablets from Chager Bazar, dating from about 2000–1900 B.C., deal with accounts, mostly relating to corn. Although the names of the months are Babylonian, the tablets appear to indicate that the district was then under the dominion of Assyria. Objects from another site, Brak, are of considerable importance in the prehistory of western Asia, as they include black-on-white pottery, similar to that found by Sir Leonard Woolley at Atchana near the mouth of the Orontes, and bearing out his conclusion as to the international importance of that region as an emporium linking the Mediterranean and the interior of western Asia. Brak has also afforded from its early levels objects belonging to a Sumerian civilization of the Archaic period, revealed in this area for the first time. Among other accessions are the now famous inscriptions on potsherds from Lachish, which are deposited by the Wellcome Trustees. These inscriptions, the Lachish letters, are the earliest known example of written Hebrew, and refer to events mentioned in the Bible and relate apparently to the siege of Lachish by Nebuchadnezzar. The Egypt Exploration Society, at the instance of Dr. Alan H. Gardiner, has presented to the Museum the antiquities allotted to it from the Society's excavations on the site of Sesebi in the Egyptian Sudan, which were exhibited at the Society's rooms in July last. It will be remembered that these excavations are of special importance for the light they throw on the earlier years of Akhnaton's rule.
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Accessions to the British Museum (Bloomsbury). Nature 140, 1046 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401046d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401046d0