Stephani, in Compte-rendu for 1876, pp. 55–6 and pl. 1, 4–7, published two small black-figure vases which he saw to be imitations of Panathenaic amphorae, but serving a different purpose: they were doubtless lekythia, intended to contain small quantities of scented oil, perhaps, he conjectured, the perfume panathenaikon which long held its own in the market (Pliny 13, 6: Panathenaicum suum Athenae pertinaciter obtinuere). A good many such vases have appeared since Stephani wrote, and the class has been studied by other writers, among them Jacobsthal (Gött. V. 15–16), Pfuhl (333), Miss Shoe (Hesp. I, 86), F. P. Johnson (AJA 1943, 393). I shall try to examine them more closely, date them more precisely, and set them in a context: the article will be a sort of appendix to Panathenaica, my study of the prize vases in AJA 1943, 441–65.

In the small collection of Greek vases in Reading University there is a pyxis, complete with lid, and also an odd lid from a similar pyxis (Pl. 6, 1 and 3), with floral decoration of the kind that prevailed in Boeotia in the latter part of the fifth century. The painting is done with care, and both vase and lid have an elegance that contrasts with the rusticity of most vases with this sort of decoration.

In shape and size the Reading vase corresponds with the well-known pyxis formerly in the Branteghem collection (Froehner Coll. Van Branteghem no. 211 PL. 46). The height of the Reading pyxis is 0·205 m., of the Branteghem pyxis 0·21 m. Its lid is flat, with an upward curve at the rim, the knob pagoda-like with six tiers, the foot in three sections, unpainted and ribbed horizontally.

Although Chios and its antiquities have been visited and described by many travellers from the earliest times, it is only recently that any serious archaeological investigations have been carried out in the island, and up to the present only two sites have been thoroughly excavated. Dr. Kourouniotis, who carried out the first excavation on Chios, gives a list, in ἈρΧ. Δελτ. I, p. 64, of the more important references to the island up to the time of that article, and for a complete list the reader is referred to the Bibliography of Chios by Dr. Philip Argenti (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

Since Dr. Kourouniotis wrote there have been several articles published in various periodicals, almost all on the epigraphy of Chios, and his list should now be supplemented by the following: Plassart and Picard, BCH XXXVII 193; A. Reinach, REG XXII pp. 193–4; Rehm, Gnomon II p. 124; Evangelides Ἀpχ· Δελτ. IX παράρτημα p. 51; Αρχ· Δελτ. XI παράρτημα 23 (and cf. Keil, Jahreshefte XIV p. 54); Arch. Anz. XLV p. 144; Peek, Ἀρχ. Ἐφ.

The remote date of the researches here described needs a word of explanation and apology.

In the latter part of the year 1913 the Committee of the Cyprus Museum received a Government grant for the purpose of exploratory work on sites selected to illustrate principal periods and aspects of antiquity, and to provide the basis for estimates of the value and the cost of operations on a larger scale. I accepted the invitation of the Committee to supervise this project, and to give to my former pupil at Oxford, Mr. Menelaos Markides, then Keeper of the Cyprus Museum, the personal introduction to field work which might enable him to continue such excavations, on a modest scale, on his own responsibility. As there was some prospect of finding human remains, I obtained from the British Association for the Advancement of Science a small grant to meet the expenses of another friend and pupil, the late Leonard H. D. Buxton of Exeter College, Oxford, who held the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology, and had been engaged in anthropometric work in the excavations of Sir Henry Wellcome at Jebel Moya in the Sudan.

The village of Lefkóniko lies on the north side of the Mesariá plain, on the main or ‘upper’ road from Nicosía (21 miles) to Tríkomo (9 miles) for the Karpass promontory. Cross-roads connect Lefkóniko northwards by Platáni (5 miles) with Akanthoú on the north coast; south-westward with Yénagra ( miles) on the alternative ‘old’ or ‘lower’ road from Nicosía to Tríkomo; southwards, through the double village Peristeróna-Piyí, with Prastió (6 miles) on the north bank of the main channel of the Pidiás river. The Gephýria stream, descending from the North Range, crosses the Tríkomo road 2 miles east of Lefkóniko, and skirts the limestone plateau which was the home-territory of ancient Salamis swerving south-east beyond Peristeróna-Piyí and joining a loop of the main river at Styllos, 4 miles east of Prastió, and about half-way to the sea.

The great midland plain (Mesariá) of Cyprus opens eastward onto a wide bay, between the long rugged Karpass promontory which shelters it on the north, and the lower and less prominent headland of Cavo Greco terminating the rolling plateau of recent limestone which divides the Mesariá from the bay of Larnaca. But the plain does not open freely onto Famagusta bay. As the Pidias river approaches the coast, its flood plain is confined between spurs and outliers of the southern upland, on which Famagusta and its modern sequel Varósha stand, and a wider plateau, roughly triangular, between the sea front south of Trikomo, by the middle course of the Kháranka (so named in the Trigonometrical Survey of Cyprus, but the word is probably Pháranga (‘ravine’) which is followed by the road from Lefkóniko to Trikomo, and by the Gephyria tributary of the Pidias which rises in the North Range, and crosses that road about two miles east of Levkóniko (p. 54–5 above), to join the main stream west of Styllos village about five miles from its mouth.

The North Range of Cyprus is a long, narrow, rugged ridge of hard steeply-inclined limestones, flanked southwards by coarse grits and sandstones, also steeply-inclined. On both sides of the range the lower slopes consist of later and softer limestones and marls, which overlie the rocks of the range unconformably, and have not been much disturbed since they were formed. The contrast is very marked between (1) the rugged peaks and spurs of the mountains, which run up, barren or sparsely forested, to more than 3000 feet, with passes as low as 1000 feet; (2) the dry brown barren ‘hummocks’ of the grits and sands, and (3) the light soil and great local fertility of the recent lowlands. This fertility depends, however, directly on the water supply; and as the greater part of the rainfall of Cyprus seems to come up from the south-west, and is liable to be intercepted by the hills, the north coast depends mainly on the discharge of the hill rainfall in springs, which break out at intervals along the upper margin of the later limestones, particularly if they are marly, and cut steep-sided torrent beds which widen seawards, and have formed alluvial coast deposits here and there.

North of the village of Karavás, the coastline projects half a mile seaward in a flat-fronted promontory nearly 2 miles wide, with a sea cliff rising in places to 20 or 25 feet. This is the front of a bed of sandy limestone, rather higher and drier than most of the coast land west of Kerynia, and more like the similar plateau on which Kerynia itself is built. It runs back southward, rising gently for about 2 miles, till it is dominated by a spur of the North Range west of the villages of Motídhes and Palaiósophos. It is bounded on the east by the Kalembóri River, which comes down past Phtérycha and Elaiá, reaches the sea at Apóstolos Andréas, and is intersected near its eastern edge by the parallel stream from Motídhes and Palaiósophos which runs out in the eastern horn of the promontory.

As the excavation at Lampousa was coming to its close, news came that tombs of the Bronze Age had been found about a mile further west, in a field bounded by the coast; and leave was at once obtained to examine the site. During most of this excavation, Mr. Leonard Buxton was in charge, and this summary of results is collected from his tomb-plans and field notes, as war-service and other duties thereafter prevented him from preparing a formal report. All the objects from these tombs were sent to the Cyprus Museum, repaired by that skilful veteran, Loizo of Dali, and registered by Mr. Markides.

The same nearly level and fairly recent deposit of sandy limestone and calcareous sand as forms the acropolis at Akheiropoiétos, here forms the foreshore, with a low ragged cliff about 10 feet above sea-level, and a level surface of sandy soil for about a quarter of a mile inland, till it is smothered by sandy hill-wash, full of springs, and mostly planted with olives.

The Bamboula Hill lies in open ground between Scala and Old Larnaca, about 100 yards north-west of the Roman Catholic Convent, and about 30 yards east of the road which runs past the front of the Convent into Old Larnaca. Another track, which diverged in 1913 from this road at the Convent, and led to the village of Livadhia, separated the Bamboula Hill site from the Bamboula Marsh, which extended nearly as far east as the carriage road from Scala to Famagusta.

The Bamboula Hill was once of much greater extent than now, and was described by old residents as having had a steep slope towards the marsh. It was on or in the Bamboula that the inscribed conquest-stele of Sargon was found in 1845, which is in the Berlin Museum.

Before leaving Cyprus in December 1913 I accepted the invitation of Mr. Markides to accompany him on a visit of inspection to the site of the Paphian Sanctuary at Kouklia which had been cleared by Messrs. Ernest Gardner, Hogarth, and Elsey Smith for the Cyprus Excavation Fund in 1887–8 (JHS IX 147 ff.). The ancient site lies on a spur of soft limestone, about a mile from the sea, where in south-westerly gales, such as we encountered, the reflected breakers, meeting incoming swell at an angle, throw up the remarkable jets of spray on which no doubt is based the myth of ‘Aphrodite rising from the waves.’ On the end of the spur stands a large mediaeval building composed of squared blocks of sandy limestone, of which the seaward wall had fallen only recently. This building seems to stand clear of the ancient site, and is worth preserving.

In ancient tradition, Aphrodite had her great sanctuary at Paphos, because it was here that she ‘rose from the sea.’ And there is a very good reason why she should have been supposed to have ‘risen from the sea’ at Paphos; a natural occurrence which it was possible to study and to explain during a spell of very stormy weather in December 1913.

The edge of the plateau, on which the Paphian Temple stands, approaches the coast a little south of the outfall of the Xylino stream, whose ravine bounds the sanctuary to the eastward. From this point north-westwards to New Paphos (Ktima), where a similar plateau-spur shelters a precarious anchorage—the Roman, mediaeval, and modern port—is a single slightly-bayed stretch of steep shingle with level fields inland, the ‘fertile plain stretching down to the sea’ in the sketch-map, JHS IX pl. vii.

Since the publication of my Handbook to the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cyprus (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1914) there have been three revisions both of the chronology there suggested—which was essentially that outlined by Colonna-Ceccaldi Monuments antiques de Cypre, Paris, 1882—and of the estimate of the debt of Cypriote sculptors to Asiatic, Egyptian, and Hellenic models and influences. All three regard Hellenic influences as primary, and Oriental influences as relatively unimportant; and consequently all bring down the beginnings of sculpture in Cyprus within the archaic period of Greek sculpture, and the period of easy access to Cyprus from the Greek treaty port of Naucratis, during the Egyptian occupation of the island between 560 and 525 B.C.

The same distractions which postponed the publication of the sanctuary site excavated at Levkoniko in 1913, and described at last on pp. 61–8 above, prevented me from replying earlier to these criticisms.

The fine marble dedicatory plaque, first published by Delacoulonche in his ‘Mémoire sur le berceau de la puissance macédonienne,’ was still serving in the autumn of 1936 as the ὰγὶα τρὰπεαзα of the church of Αγιος Γεὼργιος in Beroea. Though this important document has been often quoted in discussions on the cult of the Egyptian gods in Macedonia, no description or measurements have so far been given; no apology will, therefore, be required for giving fuller details here, along with a revised text. The accompanying photograph of a squeeze (fig. 1) will supplement Delacoulonche's line-blocks. The inscribed surface is surrounded by a well-cut moulding; there is a sistrum in relief below the inscription; the letters are very carefully engraved, with apices.

Outside the new Metropolis in Beroea lies an uninscribed fragment of a sarcophagus, belonging to the well-known type described by Altmann in his Architektur und Ornamentik der antiken Sarkophage as ‘Guirlanden-Sarkophage’. These Imperial garland-sarcophagi fall into four classes, listed thus by Miss J. M. C. Toynbee in The Hadrianic School, Cambridge, 1934, 202–3: ‘First, those on which the garlands, generally two, but sometimes three, in number, are supported by Amorini, while masks fill the semi-circular spaces above the garlands; secondly, those on which figure-scenes are substituted for masks; thirdly, the type with Victories instead of Amorini holding up the garlands, and with masks occupying the field above each garland; and, fourthly, the type with Victories as supports and with figure-scenes in the place of masks.’