P. 305.--Intercourse between the valley of the Nile and that of the Tigris and Euphrates seems to have begun not sooner than the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. To this conclusion we are led both by Egyptian texts and by the tablets in the library of Assurbanipal. Most of the tablets are reprints--if we may say so--of texts dating originally from Ur, and from the time of the ancient Chaldæan monarchy. Now these texts seem to have been written by a people who knew not Egypt; no mention of that country is to be found in them. They contain a division of the world into four regions, in none of which Egypt has a place (SAYCE, _The Early Relations of Egypt and Babylonia_, in Lepsius’s _Zeitschrift_, p. 150). P. 349.--We may here draw attention to an object which may be compared to that described by M. Clermont Ganneau, both for its intrinsic character and its probable destination. It is a tablet in brown limestone, portable, and surmounted by a ring or staple cut in the material. On one face there is a bas-relief in which the goddess who occupies the lower register in Péretié’s bronze again appears. She has the head of a lioness, a snake dangles from each hand, the arms are outstretched, and two animals, in which LAYARD recognises a lioness and a sow, hang to her breasts. This goddess stands before an animal which has a bull’s head in the engraving given by Lajard. But its feet are those of a horse, and no doubt we should find that the animal in question was a horse if we could examine the original; but we do not know what has become of it. If, as there seems reason to believe, this goddess is an infernal deity, it is easy to understand why serpents were placed in her hands. These reptiles are the symbols of resurrection; every year they quit their old skins for new ones. The object in question is described in detail in the _Recherches sur le Culte de Vénus_, p. 130, and figured in Plate XVI, Fig. 1. Upon one of the larger faces of the tablet and upon its edges there are inscriptions, magic formulæ according to M. Fr. Lenormant. This tablet was formerly in the cabinet of M. Rousseau, at one time French consul at Bagdad. It was found in the ruins of Babylon. Size, 24 inches high by 24 inches wide, and 3⅞ inches thick. P. 384.--In speaking of the excavations made by Sir H. RAWLINSON at Borsippa, we forgot to mention his paper entitled _On the Birs Nimroud; or, The Great Temple of Borsippa_ (_Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, vol. xviii. p. 1–32). Paragraphs 1 and 2 give an account of the excavations, and we regret that we wrote of the religious architecture of Chaldæa before having read them. Not that they contain anything to cause us to change our conceptions of the staged towers. The excavations seem to have been carried on with great care, but they hardly gave results as complete as they might have done had they been directed by a thoroughly-trained architect. VOL. II.