428 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITTJTION, 1916, 



edge drawn from other spheres. The British Valhim, it is now real- 

 ized, must be looked at with perpetual reference to other frontier 

 lines, such as the Germanic or the Khaetian lines; local remains of 

 everj^ kind have to be correlated with similar discoveries throughout 

 the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. 



This attitude in the investigation of the remains of Koman 

 Britain — ^the promotion of which owes so much to the energy and 

 experience of Prof. Haverfield — has in recent years conducted exca- 

 vation to specially valuable results. The work at Corbridge, the 

 ancient Corstopitum, begun in 1906, and continued down to the 

 autumn of 1911, has already uncovered throughout a gi'eat part of 

 its area the largest urban center — civil as vsell as military in charac- 

 ter—on the line of the wall, and the principal store base of its sta- 

 tions. Here, together with well-built granaries, workshops, and bar- 

 racks, and such records of civic life as are supplied by sculptured 

 stones and inscriptions, and the double discovery of hoards of gold 

 coins, has come to light a spacious and massively constructed stone 

 building, apparently a military storehouse, worthy to rank beside the 

 bridge piers of the North Tyne, among the most imposing monu- 

 ments of Roman Britain. There is much here, indeed, to carry our 

 thoughts far be3^ond our insular limits. On this, as on so many 

 other sites along the wall, the inscriptions and reliefs take us very 

 far afield. We mark the gravestone of a man of Palmyra, an altar 

 of the Tyrian Hercules — its Phoenician Baal — a dedication to a 

 pantheistic goddess of Syrian religion and the rayed effig}^ of the 

 Persian Mithra. So, too, in the neighborhood of Newcastle itself, as 

 elsewhere on the wall, there was found an altar of Jupiter Dolichenus, 

 the old Anatolian God of the Double Axe, the male form of the 

 divinity once worshipped in the prehistoric Labyrinth of Crete. 

 Nowhere are we more struck than in this remote extremity of the 

 Empire v\dth the heterogeneous religious elements, often drawn from 

 its far eastern borders, that before the days of the final advent of 

 Christianity, Roman dominion had been instrumental in diffusing. 

 The Orontes may be said to have flowed into the Tyne as well as the 

 Tiber. 



I have no pretension to follow up the various affluents merged in 

 the later course of Greco-Roman civilization, as illustrated by these 

 and similar discoveries throughout the Roman world. My own 

 recent researches have been particularly concerned with the much 

 more ancient cultural stage — that of prehistoric Crete — which leads 

 up to the Greco-Roman, and which might seem to present the prob- 

 lem of origins at any rate in a less complex shape. The marvelous 

 JSIinoan civilization that has there come to light shows that Crete of 

 4,000 years ago must unquestionably be regarded as the birthplace 

 of our European civilization in its higher form. 



