Archaeology and Ethnology

Abstract

MR. CARLETON has excavated in Iraq as a member of Sir Leonard Woolley's archæological expeditions to Ur, and he is a student of cuneiform. He writes, therefore, with the authority of first-hand knowledge; and his narrative of Mesopotamian pre- and proto-history, intended primarily for the general reader rather than the expert, summarizes in a vivid and eminently readable form the results of archæological research from the beginnings, so far back as present knowledge goes, down to the earlier half of the second millennium B.C. With commendable honesty, but also doubtless with results -which will prove disconcerting to the novice in these studies, Mr. Carleton adds an appendix on the material in the tablets of Mari, discovered after the main body of his narrative was completed, and it was too late to make any drastic revision. Hence the chapters dealing with Hammurabi and the Babylonian dynastic history, at least in their chronology and its implications, must, he points out, be set aside as superseded.

Buried Empires

The Earliest Civilisations of the Middle East. By Patrick Carleton. Pp. 290 + 12 plates. (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1939.) 10s. 6d. net.