TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 6445 
ponies. The ‘Ligurians up country from Marseilles’ apply the name ‘ Sigynne ’ 
to their pedlars, and the men of Cyprus to their spears. The last-named use of 
the word is confirmed by Aristotle,' and by an ancient commentator on Plato, 384, 
who describes this Cypriote spear as a ‘throwing-spear wholly made of iron,’ 
Such spears have been found in Cypriote sites of the Hellenic Aye. ‘Their close 
resemblance to the Roman legionary pilwm cannot be due to direct imitation, for 
the Cypriote examples are earlier than the period when Rome reached Cyprus. 
On the other hand, a very similar weapon, the ge@swm (which Hesychius describes 
as a ‘spear like a spit, wholly of iron,’ and which Athenzeus states that the Romans 
borrowed later from the Celtiberiaus of Spain® in the first half of the second 
century B.c.) became known to the Romans in the latter part of the third century 
B.C. through the invasion of the Po valley by the Transalpine Gesate. The home 
of the latter was certainly within the region within which was developed the La 
Tene phase of Karly Iron Age culture; and both the earlier La Téne culture, and 
the later Hallstatt phases which preceded it, show great experimental freedom in 
the modelling of their spear-heads, and close approximation to the pilum type of 
weapon. 
i view of the Herodotean description of ‘Sigynne’ as carrying on retail 
trade as far west as the hinterland of Marseilles, the suggestion is made that the 
Celtiberian prototype of the Roman gesum is itself a western offshoot of the same 
iron culture as gave rise to the transalpine gesum. Copious iron-workings have 
been studied by Quiquerez on the slopes of the Jura within site of La Téne and 
the other Swiss sites of that series; and the name of the Sigynnee itself seems to 
survive in that of the Seguani, who still occupied the Jura and its neighbourhood 
in the first century B.c. 
That sections of the Sigynne moved similarly eastward is suggested by the 
recurrence of their name on the lower Danube ° and in Caucasus,‘ in both cases 
associated with ‘ Median dress’ and with the same shaggy ponies. In Caucasus 
they inhabit a region characterised by a notable offshoot of the same early 
Tron Age culture as that of the Hallstatt region, An intermediate link is supplied 
(1) by the repetition of the name of the ’Eneti or Veneti in Homeric times in 
N.W. Asia Minor; (2) by the survival, in N.E. Asia Minor, of a notable iron 
culture among the folk whom the Greeks knew as the Chalybes. 
The suggestion is therefore made that Herodotus may be right in recording the 
same name ‘Sigynnie’ as applied to the similar ‘throwing-spear wholly made of 
iron’ which characterised the Iron Age culture of Cyprus in early Hellenic times, 
more particularly as Cyprus preserves also a peculiar type of iron sword and a 
group of types of fibulee which only find parallel in the Italo-Hallstatt region, 
3. An Account of some Souterrains in Ulster. By Mrs. Mary Hoxson. 
The souterrains described are for the most part situated in the two counties of 
Antrim and Down, The muterials are rough, undressed field stones, no mortar 
being used. The buildings display great diversity in plan, some being merely 
oblong chambers and long passages; others crescent-shaped, some resembling the 
letter F, the same letter without the middle stroke (F), an inflated stocking, an 
uneven capital W, &c., and some are circular. 
Greater variety of construction occurs in Antrim than in Down. In the 
former, two described were scooped out of basaltic ash; in others, rocks in situ 
were used and filled in artificially ; in some, tunnelling had been done in harder 
rock. The entrances are small, but the tiny doorways between one chamber and 
another are even of more diminutive dimensions—great numbers: being too small 
to admit the average-sized man—a person having to lie down flat in order to get 
through, and even then the width will not allow other than the shoulders of a 
woman or boy to pass through, 
Tradition assigns the souterrains and the raths in which so many of them 
1 Poetics, 21. ? Athenzus, vi. 273. 
% Apollonius Rhodius, iv, 320. * Strabo, p. 520. 
