The credit for the discovery of the great antiquity of Jericho belongs to Professor John Garstang, who excavated there between 1930 and 1936. In those days our picture of man's emergence from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic savagery through Neolithic barbarism to the civilization of the metal ages was a neat and tidv one. The nomadic hunters of the first stage discovered agricultuer and stock-breedkg and were thus assured of enough subsistence to become settled villagers, self-sufficient and unprogressive, but at least no longer savages. After long years of this unprogressiveness the eventual discovery of the uses of metal led to trade, specialization, the need for surplus food to feed the traders and specialists, the growth in importance of favoured areas such as the great river valleys and the development of the villages there into towns through the accumulation of surpluses and the consequent need for organized rule to control them. The theory was reasonable, and what was then known about the early village settlements in Western Asia and the rise of towns and states in the river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia seemed to fit the facts. A chronology of early villages in the later fifth millennium and the growth of towns in the later fourth, leading to states in the third, seemed to cover what was known.

Among the adventures of Odysseus described in the Odyssey one of the least A favourable to ancient or modern attempts to make a geography of his wanderings is traditionally his visit to the isle of Aeolus, who bound the winds for him in a bag. The famous geographer Eratosthenes said of the whole problem: ‘It will only be discovered where Odysseus’ wanderings lie when the cobbler is discovered who stitched together the bag of the winds’. Others have not failed to point out that Homer makes it a floating island anyhow, as if he were determined that no one should find it, and that the procedure of tying the winds in a bag is a piece of magic, known in practice or recorded in folk-lore in too many parts of the world for a definite location to be possible.

Domus Aurea, the Golden House. The name conjures up a vision of splendour, which even a visit to the gloomy vaults beneath the southern slopes of the EsquiIine cannot altogether dispel. All too little has survived ; and unless there are surprises in store for us still below ground, it seems unlikely that we shall ever know very much more about it from the actual remains than we do at present. But with each year that passes fresh knowledge accumulates in other, related fields. Vision shifts and perspectives change, and every now and then it becomes worth while once again to take stock, to ask which of the old problems still matter, and to see what are the new ones that have now to be considered. The present article, which lays no claim to originality, is an attempt to present and assess the present state of scholarly opinion about what must, by any computation, be held to be one of the most important buildings in the whole long history of classical architecture.