copper. A Ptolemaic coinage succeeded in
the third century that of the local rulers; the Roman coinage, with
inscriptions sometimes in Greek, sometimes in Latin, lasts from
Augustus to the beginning of the third century. Coins of the
Byzantine Emperors and of the Lusignan Kings are common.

[ILLUSTRATION VII: BILINGUAL (GREEK AND CYPRIOTE) DEDICATION TO
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE FROM CURIUM.]

CHAPTER V

CENTRAL AND NORTH SYRIA

[See the diagrams of flint implements, Illustration II; of pottery
and weapons, &c., VIII & IX; of alphabets, X & XI.]

The following notes are to be accepted as only a rough and imperfect
guide, since no part of Syria, north of Palestine, has been widely or
minutely explored, and the archaeology of the earliest period, in
Central Syria, for example, is almost unknown.

The periods into which the archaeological history of Syria should be
divided are roughly, as follows:

I. Neolithic and Chalcolithic Age, to about 2000 B.C.
II. Bronze Age or Early Hittite, to about 1100 B.C.
III. Iron Age or Late Hittite, to about 550 B.C.
IV. Persian Period, to about 330 B.C.
V. Hellenistic Period, to about 100 B.C.
VI. Roman Period.
VII. Byzantine Period.

I. Neolithic.

No purely Neolithic sites yet known, but lowest strata of remains at
Sakjegozu and Sinjerli, on the Carchemish citadel, and in certain
kilns at Yunus near by, and also pot-burials among house remains are
of this Age. (But see Chapter VIII, Mesopotamia, whose Neolithic
period is similar.)

Stone implements:
as in Greece, including obsidian of very clear texture, probably of
inner Asiatic, not Aegean production. Bone needles and other
implements.

Pottery.
Four varieties have been observed: (1) buff ground with simple linear
decoration applied direct on the gritty body-clay in lustreless
pigments, black, chocolate-brown, or red, according to the firing;
(2) greenish-buff face, hand-polished, with polychrome varnish
decoration of vandykes and other geometric motives; (3) monochrome,
black to grey, not burnished, but sometimes decorated with incised
linear patterns; (4) plain red or buff (e.g. large urns in which
Neolithic burials were found on the Carchemish citadel). All pottery
hand-made.

Figurines:
rude clay and stone figurines are likely to occur, but have as yet
been found very rarely in Neolithic strata.

Copper implements:
traces observed at Carchemish: to be looked for.

II. Bron