The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal Numismatic Society

KOYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY. 21
reveals at every turn a genuine philological instinct, and
one might almost say a thirst for alphabets. In the first
volume of the series, published in 1897, which deals with the
Coins of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia and hardly less in
the second, dating from 1900, devoted to Lycaonia, Isauria,
and Cilicia, your researches continually led you beyond the
pure Hellenic limits into curious borderlands occupied by
members of the old Anatolian races and among records, the
languages of which are still untranslated, and of which the
characters are still in cases imperfectly deciphered. Your next
volume on the Greek Coinage of Cyprus, which saw the light
in 1904, involved you in the necessity of grappling with the pre-
historic syllabary of that island. From the Semitic Coinage of
Kition you passed by a natural transition to your next consider-
able undertaking, carried through in 1910, dealing with the
issues of the Phoenician cities. The pendant to this in turn
has been your recently issued Catalogue of the Greek Coins
of Palestine. It is impossible here to enlarge on the complex
and interesting problems on which it has been necessary for
you to touch in the course of these latter volumes problems
which continually transcend merely numismatic limits.
Here, again, many of the religious elements lie quite outside
the classical borders, and not only include illustrations of
Semitic Cult in its earlier aniconic as well as its most
advanced phases, but in the case of Gaza, at least, lead us
back to Philistine sanctuaries, and through them to the still
earlier source in Minoan Crete. Some of these points have
been further elaborated by you in a communication to the
British Academy and in the notes to your translation of the
Life of Porphyry of Gaza.
Your contributions to the Numismatic CJironicle cover the
whole field of ancient numismatics. We have been indebted
to you for a continuation of the valuable summaries of Greek
Coins acquired for the National Collection, and for a descrip-
tion of a series of hoards of coins found in this country.