24 



ARCHAEOLOGY. 



precipices, the entrances to many of the dwellings 

 being 700 feet above the river, and accessible only 

 by climbing up from the bottom or down from the 

 top. One building in this region had 1,500 rooms, 

 and another, a pyramidal structure, was 3 stories 

 high, with 500 rooms on the ground floor. Many 

 skeletons, representing different Indian races, were 

 recovered. 



The Archaeological Institute of America has for 

 several years sustained an archaeological school 

 at Athens, which has accomplished much that is 

 valuable in the exploration of Grecian sites. The 

 new school at Rome had in 1899-1900 a year of 

 successful work with American and Italian teach- 

 ers. A school of Oriental studies in Palestine was 

 to open in October, 1900. 



An expedition is in course of organization under 

 the direction of President William R. Harper, of 

 the University of Chicago, Bishops Potter and 

 1 1 u rst, and others, to explore the ruins of Ur of 

 the Chaldees, the city of Abraham. The site was 

 visited by Mr. Tayler, an English consul, in 1854, 

 who made sufficient excavations to reveal the wall 

 of an ancient temple which was described as being 

 an unusually perfect specimen of Babylonian archi- 

 tecture. In" some of the graves Mr. Taylor found 

 inscribed tablets, pottery, and ornaments of gold, 

 silver, and precious stones. Ancient inscriptions 

 uncovered by Arabs quarrying bricks from the 

 mounds are to be found lying on the surface of 

 the ground. From the importance of Ur in very 

 ancient times, the excavations are expected to 

 afford results of great value. 



British. Closing his presidential address be- 

 fore the anthropological section of the British 

 Association on The Early Ethnology of the British 

 Isles as studied from the sides of language and 

 folklore, Prof. John Rhys summarized his conclu- 

 sions by saying that "the first race we have found 

 in possession of the British Isles consisted of a 

 small, swarthy population of mound dwellers, of 

 an unwarlike disposition, much given to magic 

 and wizardry and, perhaps, of Lappish affinities; 

 its attributes have been exaggerated or otherwise 

 distorted in the evolution of the little people of 

 our fairy tales. The next race consisted of a taller, 

 blonder people, with blue eyes, who tattooed them- 

 M-lves and fought battles. These tattooed or Pict- 

 ish people made the mound folk their slaves, and 

 in the long run their language may be supposed 

 to have been modified by habits of speech intro- 

 duced by those slaves of theirs from their own 

 idiom. The affinities of those Picts may be called 

 Libyan, and possibly Iberian. Next came the Celts 

 in two great waves of immigration, the first of 

 which may have arrived as early as the seventh 

 century before our era, and consisted of the real 

 ancestors of some of our Goidels of the Milesian 

 stock and the linguistic ancestors of all the peo- 

 ples who have spoken Goidelic. That language 

 may be defined as Celtican so modified by the 

 idioms of the population which the earlier Celts 

 found in possession that its syntax is no longer 

 Aryan. Then, about the third century R. c., came 

 from Begica the linguistic ancestors of the peoples 

 who have spoken Brythonic, but in the majority 

 of cases connected with modern Brythonic they 

 are to be regarded as Goidels who adopted Bry- 

 thonic speech, and in so doing brought down into 

 that language their Goidelic idioms, with the re- 

 sult that the syntax of insular Brythonic is no less 

 non-Aryan than that of Goidelic, as may be read- 

 ily seen by comparing the thoroughly Aryan struc- 

 ture of the few sentences of old Gaulish extant." 



The author had proceeded in his study on tlie 

 principle that each >u< < M-^ive band of conquerors 

 had its race, language, and institutions eventually 



more or less modified by contact with those whom 

 it had conquered, and he had endeavored to sub- 

 stitute for the supernatural beings of Celtic legend 

 a possible series of peoples. These views await 

 confirmation by archeology. 



The excavations .at Silchester, prosecuted from 

 July 20 to the end of August, 1899, consisted very 

 largely in the exploration of the granary, where 

 the marks of destruction by fire and the fall of 

 the floor and roof into the vault of the hypocaust 

 were very evident. On a paved floor between two 

 walls of an adjoining building, supposed to be the 

 praetorium, were found three coins^including a 

 second brass of the second century and a third 

 brass of the third. Between two other walls was 

 a piece of solid masonry, somewhat resembling a 

 doorway. At another point a small turret was 

 found, which proved to be a guard chamber of the 

 westerly gateway. Among the smaller objects 

 turned out were a first brass coin of Antoninus 

 Pius and a third brass of Constantine the Great, a 

 somewhat delicate pair of tweezers with a ring clip, 

 a bone bodkin, a pin, several pieces of stamped and 

 ornamental pottery, and a broken pillar, about 

 9 inches high, bearing six letters of a former in- 

 scription. 



Roman. At the time of the suspension of the 

 excavations of the Basilica Emilia, in the winter of 

 1899-1900, although the section laid bare was less 

 than half of the total area, yet, according to Prof. 

 Rodolfo Lanciani, by reason of the symmetry of 

 the lines, a sufficient knowledge of the general plan 

 and elevation of the structure had been gained. 

 The building comprised three parts: a central hall, 

 divided into nave and aisles by a double line of 

 columns; two rows of cells or tabernte on either 

 side of the central hall, opening on the outside por- 

 ticoes; and these porticoes, which decorated the 

 longitudinal side of the building the side facing 

 the forum, the only one as yet brought to light. 

 The decoration of the front, on the side of the 

 argiletum, and of the back, on the side of Faus- 

 tina's Temple, has not been made clear. The 

 basilica, or central hall, resembles in design that 

 of Trajan, except that it has only two aisles in- 

 stead of four. The line of separation between the 

 aisles and the nave was marked by a row of col- 

 umns, of which hardly any sign is left. The wall 

 runs plain and flat, without any pilasters corre- 

 sponding to the columns. The pavement of both 

 aisles and nave is in a good state of preservation. 

 It is composed of large slabs of giallo, portasanta, 

 africano, cipollino, etc., all rectilinear and ar- 

 ranged so as to harmonize in design with the site 

 of the columns. This pavement was found covered 

 with loose copper coins of the end of the fifth or 

 beginning of the sixth century, which with other 

 rubbish bore marks of the action of fire. The 

 central hall had an upper story or colonnade a 

 kind of structure which, according to Vitruvius, 

 was set aside for the women of the audience. The 

 Corinthian capitals are very graceful and skillfully 

 executed. " In fact," says Prof. Lanciani, " every 

 particle of the architectural decoration of this 

 building is absolutely perfect." A commemorat ive 

 inscription was engraved on the frieze of the lower 

 order, of which only two fragments have been re- 

 covered. The Basilica Emilia, originally con- 

 structed B.C. 179, underwent five restorations, tin- 

 last under Tiberius, from whose time the frag- 

 ments discovered date. 



Among the epigraphic discoveries described by 

 Prof. Rodolfo Lanciani as having been made in the 

 excavations of the Basilica Emilia is a fragment 

 of the Fasti Consulares, which before its mutila- 

 tion contained the list of the military tribunes 

 from A. v. c. 374 to 378 and the list of consuls 



