During the winter of 1948–9, in the course of work undertaken to widen the Tal Liedna and the Ghajn Dwieli Roads, which from Pawla lead to Zabbar and to Cospicua respectively, thirteen rock-cut tombs were discovered (Fig. 1). These operations necessitated the complete clearing away of a layer of field soil, varying in thickness from one to three feet, to expose the surface of the underlying Globigerina Limestone formation. Blasting of the rock was also effected to attain the required level.

The discovery of rock-cut tombs in Malta is not of rare occurrence; but in the majority of cases they are found opened and rifled of all the material originally contained in them. The particular interest attached to the burials under consideration is that, when found, almost all of them were still intact and in a comparatively good state of preservation.

In presenting the material that is the subject of this paper, it should be stressed at the outset that this is in no sense a full excavation report. The circumstances of the excavation itself and of its interruption, the subsequent loss or destruction of much both of the material itself and of the records of its discovery, and the death of Professor Ugo Rellini, who conducted a part of the excavation—the combination of all these circumstances means that such a report can never now be written. Nevertheless, the intrinsic interest of the material that survives and the preservation by Dr. Baumgartel of her own excavation notes have seemed to justify a more limited publication; and the main purpose of the present article is to present a type-series of the pottery and of such of the other material as has survived, and at the same time to record something of its stratigraphy and of the observed chronological sequence.

The artist I call the Lampas painter painted the torch-race on the mug in the Karlsruhe Museum that Blümel reproduced on plate 134 of his book Sport der Hellenen. Though I have found it difficult to place the style of the Lampas painter within the whole production of Apulian vases with certainty, I have no doubt that it is Apulian.

Sir John Beazley first pointed out to me that the style of the mug in Karlsruhe was identical with that of the mug Oxford 1934.17. Later I came across two more vases, which, I thought, should go with those in Karlsruhe and Oxford. One was in Truro, the other in Reading. I compared photographs of them with Blümel's reproduction of the Karlsruhe vase and photographs of the Oxford vase, and came to the conclusion that they were all painted by the same hand.

This is a short description of the subjects represented on the four vases by the Lampas painter known to me:

1. Mug (oinochoe shape VIII B). Karlsruhe Museum. Pl. V, 1, after Blümel, Sport der Hellenen, 115, pl. 1 34. Three naked youths in torch-race. On either side of the first racer a post. Height 125 mm.

During the years 1895–6 the late H. Swainson Cowper visited the Tarhuna pleateau of Tripolitania and examined in considerable detail a large number of ancient sites. The results of this exploration, first published in the Antiquary, were later embodied in a monograph published in 1897. Cowper was not the first European to visit the ancient monuments of the Tarhuna region: he had been preceded by Smyth (1817), Barth (1850), Von Bary (1875), and Rohlfs (1879). His own work was more detailed, and geographically more concentrated, than that of his predecessors, and his publication, amply illustrated by photographs and drawings, remains to-day an indispensable companion for any investigator of ancient sites in the eastern Gebel.

Cowper's main thesis, which occupies a predominant place in his book, was that the trilithon-shaped ‘senams’ (arabic for ‘idols’) of the Tarhuna plateau were prehistoric monuments of a religious character. This conclusion was immediately challenged by Sir John Myres and the late Sir Arthur Evans, who demonstrated conclusively that these megalithic structures were in fact the frames of Roman olive-presses. In consequence general interest in the Tarhuna plateau declined, and even the researches of De Mathuisieulx (1901–4), which resulted in the discovery of the important neo Punic inscription of Ras el-Haddagia, failed to counterbalance the lost repute of the ‘senams’.

The article that follows is the result of two years spent in Italy under a scholarship of the British School at Rome. The writer's original intention was to attempt a general study of ancient bridge-construction in Italy. It soon became obvious, however, that this was an almost impossible task, owing to the lack of adequately published material. On the great roads leading out of Rome, comparatively little original work has been done in the last thirty years; and if the destruction of ancient roads and of their attendant structures continues for much longer at the present rate, there will soon be little left to publish. The damage done during the late war was very considerable; and although a damaged bridge may in some ways be more rewarding than an intact one, a bridge that has been both damaged and reconstructed is of very little archaeological interest indeed.

For these reasons, it has seemed that the immediate need is not so much for a general work, which would necessarily be incomplete, as for a straight-forward description of the remains of bridges along some part of the ancient road-system of Italy, together with such comment as seems necessary to point out the problems involved.

In 1816 the Bey of Tripoli presented to the Prince Regent a cargo of antiquities from Lepcis Magna. They were brought to England in 1817, and, after a sojourn in the courtyard of the British Museum, went to Virginia Water with material from other sources, to be disposed in a sham ruin. One inscribed stone was subsequently returned to the British Museum. Its findspot is certain, for it was seen c. 1806 at Lepcis Magna by J. D. Delaporte, among the remains of a building since identified as, possibly, the Temple of Jupiter Dolichenus.

It is a block of the grey limestone typical of public building at Lepcis in the first and early second centuries A.D., part of an entablature, with mouldings above and below, a socket for a roofbeam at the back, and a monumental inscription on the face. Previous publications of the text are incomplete. There are two lines of Latin, followed by one in neo-Punic. The Latin text reads:

… VESPASIAN]I F DOM[ITIAN… (erased)

…] AVG SVFE[…

Lightning was not always regarded as just a meteorological phenomenon: it strongly inspired religious imagination and caused cult observations before science had its word, and even after that. Its history was treated in a masterly fashion by Usener (1905), and there is no need to return to it, especially after O. Gilbert's survey of the scientific lore (1907) and A. B. Cook's substantial and learned supplements and illustrations to Usener (1925). They neglected, however, the Etruscan libri fulgurales which, although depending on both religion and science, are not concerned with either in general but with divination. Here too the ground is well prepared, and three men deserve particular mention, K. O. Miiller, the pioneer, Thulin for his indispensable monograph, and W. Kroll for an observation about the historical background. Müller (1828) and Thulin (1906) discussed the evidence under four headings, consultation, procuration, repulsion, and conjuration, Miiller in a short and selective narrative, Thulin exhaustively; and many valuable observations and interpretations were made by both. Thulin bravely faced all difficulties and contradictions but rather presented the case than decided it: there is no thesis at the beginning and no conclusion at the end. In addition, he did not appreciate sufficiently the problem of origins. This problem did not exist in Müller's day and was not really acute when Thulin wrote. He knew and quoted many Eastern parallels by way of illustration but explained their existence by the Eastern origin of the Etruscans, which is a hypothesis and not an explanation and fails at any rate whenever the doctrine in question is of a recent date.

The purpose of this note is to discuss a late fourteenth-century tomb slab in the church of Santa Maria della Incoronata in Naples. In the course of collecting material for a study of the medieval tombs of Naples, which the Director of the British School at Rome and the present writer are preparing, this tomb, which is in many ways eccentric to the rest of the series, seemed of sufficient interest to merit treatment on its own.

The slab (pl. XXI, 1), of Greek marble, now stands on end, together with six others, against the south wall of the west aisle. When Cesare d'Engenio saw it in the early seventeenth century it was still in situ in the floor of the same aisle. The figure is carved in low relief beneath a delicately traceried canopy with pinnacles and spiral columns, the whole set within a rectangular inscribed frame.