260 



DISCOVERY 



the Great in his turn repaired E-nun-makh, and it is 

 interesting to see how closely that agrees with the 

 description given by Herodotus of the contemporary 

 temple of^Bel at Babylon. 



Of particular interest are the broken fragments of 

 dedicated vases which have already been mentioned, 

 for these not only, by their decoration and by the 

 inscriptions on them, throw light on the early art and 

 history of southern Mesopotamia, but they have an 

 important bearing on the vexed question of Egyptian 

 chronology. The whole collection belongs to a period 

 whose limits are 3000 to 2000 B.C., and many of the 

 vases are of Egyptian type and material, in some cases 

 apparently actual importations from the Nile valley, 

 in others close copies of imported originals ; and while 

 the bulk of the types are those of the First Egyptian 

 Dynasty, none are later than the Fifth. So far as it 

 goes, the evidence is all in favour of the " shorter 

 chronology " ; it is to be hoped that further synchroni- 

 sations may yet be found to settle this much-disputed 

 problem of ancient history. 



A Royal Statue 5,000 Years Old 



Our most important individual " find " was a head- 

 less diorite statue of Entemena, king of Lagash about 

 2900 B.C. (Fig. 4). The squat figure wears the usual 

 Sumerian robe of sheep's fleece, and bears a long in- 

 scription engraved across the back and shoulders. In a 

 deep brick-lined well there were found a number of large 

 clay cones inscribed with the building records of the 

 Larsa kings who reigned towards the end of the second 

 millennium, records which add greatly to our know- 

 ledge of the history of the site. Under the Persian 

 floor of E-nun-makh was discovered a hoard of jewel- 

 lery, beads, brooches, pendants, earrings, bracelets, 

 and rings of gold and semi-precious stones, a gold pin 

 with a head in the form of a full-length figure of a 

 priestess, and bronze and silver vessels, all heaped 

 together below the pavement-tiles. A smaller hoard 

 found in another part of the site was of earlier date, 

 probably of the seventh century B.C. 



The great temples of the sacred city were repaired 

 for the last time by Cyrus. Not long afterwards, per- 

 haps about 450 B.C., Persian iconoclasts, who made 

 a movement against the use of images in religion, 

 destroyed by fire all these monuments of old idolatry. 

 Ur did not long survive the religion which had been its 

 glory ; a rapidly dwindling remnant of inhabitants 

 squatted on the ruins of the ancient shrines, and prob- 

 ably by the time of the Macedonian conquest the 

 city (333-323 B.C.) was " fallen upon an heap," hardly 

 less desolate than it is to-day. 



At present we have recovered only the skeleton of 

 a history which lasted for at least four thousand years, 

 perhaps for twice as long ; further excavations should 



fill up many gaps in our knowledge and yield some- 

 thing like a continuous record of this, one of the earliest 

 cradles of Man's civilisation. It is to be hoped that 

 the happy co-operation of the British Museum with 

 the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, in- 

 augurated by the renewed work of 1922-3, will 

 result in the construction of such a record obtained 

 from regularly continued and systematic excavation. 



Antarctic Pack-ice and the 

 Fate of the "Endurance" 



By R. W. James, M.A. 



Senior Lecturer in Physics in Vie Universily of Manchester ; Member 

 0/ the " Endurance " Expedition 



SuRROUNDiN'G the Antarctic Continent, and extending 

 in many regions hundreds of miles from its shores, is 

 a great belt of floating ice, known usually as the pack- 

 ice, or, more shortly, simply as the " pack." This 

 ice-belt is certainly one of the most considerable of 

 world-phenomena. Formed mainly in high southern 

 latitudes by the freezing of the sea-water, the ice is 

 driven northward by the prevailing winds which flow 

 outwards from the continental ice-cap, while to the 

 south fresh ice is formed to take its place, so that 

 there is, on the whole, a continuous flow of ice north- 

 ward, carrying polar conditions considerably beyond 

 the true geographical polar regions. 



The study of the movements of the polar ice is of 

 great scientific interest, particularly from the meteoro- 

 logical point of view. It is perhaps not too much 

 to hope that, as the circulation of air and ice in the 

 polar regions becomes better known, weather fore- 

 casting in the Southern Hemisphere may become much 

 more definite than it is at present. Weather is largely 

 conditioned by air movement, and air movement is 

 due in the first place to temperature differences. 

 Evidently then, a northward flow of ice and cold 

 air from the polar regions on such a vast scale must 

 have enormous influence on the climatic conditions 

 of the whole hemisphere. 



Hitherto the pack-ice has been considered mainly 

 as an obstacle to navigation. Such detailed studies 

 as have been made of it have been made by ships 

 frozen in and forced to drift with the ice. Such drifts 

 are irksome and dangerous, and fatal to the full 

 success of an expedition, yet they are not without 

 scientific value. In the Antarctic the drift of the 

 pack-ice has been studied in this way by the Belgica, 



