  We study the relationship between static p-brane solitons and cosmological
solutions of string theory or M-theory. We discuss two different ways in which
extremal p-branes can be generalised to non-extremal ones, and show how wide
classes of recently discussed cosmological models can be mapped into
non-extremal p-brane solutions of one of these two kinds. We also extend
previous discussions of cosmological solutions to include some that make use of
cosmological-type terms in the effective action that can arise from the
generalised dimensional reduction of string theory or M-theory.
