Abstract
A SERIOUS gap in the archaeological material available for study in museum collections in Great Britain has been filled by accessions to the British Museum (Bloomsbury) reported at the meeting of the Trustees held on June 10. Representative specimens have been received of the antiquities found at Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley during the years 1925-28 in the archaeological excavations carried out under Sir John Marshall, formerly Director of Archaeology in India. The collection consists of 247 pieces, which have been acquired by exchange from the Director General of Archaeology in India. It is of especial value to archaeologists not only on account of the fact that the Indus Valley civilization, one of the major archaeological discoveries of the decade following the Great War, was almost completely unrepresented previously in English museum collections, but also because of the extent to which it throws light on the relations between this civilization and that of Mesopotamia in the course of the third millennium B.C. The list of accessions to the Museum also included a remarkable archaic Sumerian figure of a seated mountain goat in gold, about 1J inches long, which has been given by Mr. J. A. Spranger. It is dated approximately at about 2500 B.C. Roughly it is contemporary with, though larger than, similar objects found at Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley. From Mr. M. E. L. Mallowan's excavations in northern Syria of last year come a group of Chalcolithic pottery from the Balikh Valley and antiquities from Brak, among which are the remarkable series of amulets, seals and necklaces of beads and coloured stones, as well as the frieze from the pedestal of the statue found in a sanctuary, consisting of rows of different coloured stones or artificial material, fixed at top and bottom with gold bands and gold nails. It is dated approximately at 3000 B.C. A gold figure of a weather god of Hittite origin from Anatolia, dating from the fourteenth or thirteenth century B.C., was acquired by purchase.
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Accessions to the British Museum (Bloomsbury). Nature 143, 1015 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/1431015c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1431015c0