Even a hurried glance at the walls of the Byzantine citadel, or a rapid inspection of the material collected by the Ankara Archaeological Museum at the depot in the Roman baths is enough to show that Ankara contains a richer collection of Greek and Latin inscriptions than almost any other city of the Anatolian plateau. A long sequence of epigraphic publications stretches back to 1555 when the companions of Augier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent, made the first copy of the Res Gestae, inscribed on the walls of the temple of Rome and Augustus. Since then a succession of travellers and epigraphists has added to the total of known inscriptions, and even if none of their discoveries can rank beside the record which the first emperor published of his life and actions, many of them are of considerable importance both for the history of Ancyra itself and in the wider context of the Roman Empire and the Byzantine world.

However, any general study of these inscriptions and their historical implications has been hampered by the fact that they are scattered in a wide range of publications, many of them difficult to obtain. This situation has been partially remedied by Professor E. Bosch's Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Ankara im Altertum, completed in its essentials by 1945, but only published after the author's death by the TTK press in Ankara in 1967. This contains a large proportion of the source material relevant to the city's history from its earliest appearance in the classical sources to the age of Constantine, accompanied by a commentary in German. However, despite its usefulness, the book has not fulfilled the need for a full corpus of the city's inscriptions.

In the winter of 1974 farmers working in their fields near the village of Selimiye about fifteen kilometres south-east of Ceyhan uncovered a small round limestone altar bearing an image in relief of the goddess Athena (Pl. XVII a). The form and attributes of the figure—left hand on shield, left leg slightly bent, Nike on right hand, aegis on breast—clearly indicate that the relief owes much to Pheidias' great chryselephantine statue in Athens. It may thus be added to a considerable number of representations dating back to Hellenistic times that show the interest in Pheidias' masterpiece in southeastern Asia Minor. In itself it is important as an addition to the handful of reliefs depicting one of the most famous monuments of antiquity.

The altar joins a number of other similar monuments, mostly funerary in nature, of varying dimensions in the Adana regional museum. Its height is 0·64 m., its diameter at the base 0·38 m. It consists of a flat round base supporting a series of mouldings (torus, cyma reversa, fillet—Fig. 1a), a central drum divided unequally into a lower and a slightly projecting upper section, a further series of mouldings (fillet, ovolo—Fig. 1b) above which rises a biconical rim with flattened edge, a short continuation of the drum and finally a capping moulding (much mutilated in our specimen). The top is slightly convex with a shallow, rough depression in the middle 0·011 m. deep and 0·11 m. in diameter. Except for the relief and surrounding area the whole stone is dressed down with a claw chisel. There is some entasis apparent in the central portion of the drum.

The origin of felt is unknown. It is in all probability the earliest form of textile making. Like most textiles, it has a low survival rate in archaeological conditions, so that specimens from the earlier millennia rarely come to light. The earliest documentation on it comes from China, c. 2300 B.C. but it is from the Central Asian Steppes that archaeologists have so far found the earliest examples of it. It has been produced there ever since. Sir Aurel Stein made numerous interesting discoveries of felt on his many journeys in Asia.

Through T'ang writers we first hear of felt in Tibet and that the Chinese were familiar with the famous felt industry of Persia. Herodotus gives accounts of its frequent use amongst the Persians and associated tribes. Strabo, for example, describes the felt caps of the Persians as “high turbans of felt” which protected them from the cold winters of Media. The Medes themselves can still be seen in the fifth century B.C. portrayed in their rounded felt caps in the reliefs of the Achaemenian palaces of Persepolis. (Pl. XlXa)

The object of this paper is to re-examine the Greek literary traditions concerning a Phrygian migration from Europe to Asia Minor and the early movements of that people within Asia Minor, also allusions to these traditions in local legends and coin-types of the Roman period. Such archaeological and philological evidence as there may be for a migration is not considered: a superficial examination would seem to indicate that neither of these disciplines can yet suggest a clearcut picture of population movement which we can relate to that presented by the literary evidence, and I am not qualified to take part in the creation of one. Without supporting evidence from either of these disciplines it must be emphasised that the historicity of the events recorded in the traditions must remain open to doubt. The discussion that follows is concerned with the development of the traditions, especially that which we shall call the “Anatolian tradition”, as purely literary constructions, not as historical accounts.

In a recent article Dr Nadav Na'aman suggested that two rulers called Yarimlim and two called Ammitakumma succeeded each other in alternation during the period of the Level VII archive at Alalakh. This reconstruction of the chronology fails, as do all previous reconstructions, to take into account the seal impressions on the tablet envelopes. These seal impressions have now been published and the chronology which they enabled me to reconstruct is substantially that established by Rowton and Kupper. A close study of Dr Na'aman's article has not led me to alter my views and I should like to make the following points.

Dr Na'aman questions the generally accepted chronology for Alalakh on the grounds that YḪammurapi I (grandfather),AYarimlim (father) and AAmmitakumma (son) “reigned over a period of at least 125 years” and that “six kings reigned in Yamḫad concurrently with two Kings at Alalakh”. He accepts a date “circa the twenties of the 18th century B.C. (or slightly earlier)” for the beginning of the archive and therefore, presumably, for the beginning of the reign of AYarimlim.

Palaeolithic assemblages in the Near East do not yield any clay artifacts. During the Mesolithic period clay objects begin to appear as rarities but with the beginning of the Neolithic one witnesses a proliferation of uses of clay for architecture, house furnishings, firing devices, containers, and a variety of objects. Suddenly the villages seem to consist entirely of clay. I have been puzzled by the seemingly long indifference of man towards a material as easy to work with and as accessible as clay, followed by a sudden floruit. I have tried to find out more about the beginnings of the use of clay and have studied Near Eastern clay collections looking for answers to three questions: (1) When did clay begin to be used? (2) What is the evolutionary pattern of the first uses of clay? (3) What gave clay its sudden importance? I first tackled these problems in the Zagros and in Syria. The present paper is a review of the first evidences of the use of clay in Anatolia.

Turkey has always served as a bridgehead between the continents of Europe and Asia and there are four main ways of crossing it (Fig. 1). The southerly route ran up one or other of the west coast valleys onto the Anatolian plateau, and crossed by the great lakes of Eǧridir and Beyşehir to Konya and thence down through the Taurus mountains by the Cilician Gates into the plain of Adana. From here the routes southwards into Syria and Egypt or eastwards into Mesopotamia and Persia were clear of further geographical obstacles. This was the great route of the Hellenistic and Roman periods when the trade and communications network of Asia Minor were channelled westwards through the ports either of Ephesus or one of the other west coast cities.

The number of known Hittite rock-reliefs in Anatolia is limited: Karabel, Manisa, Yazılıkaya, Gavurkalesi, Fıraktin, İmamkulu, Taşcı, İvriz, Gezbeli, Sirkeli, and Hemite. Except the Late Hittite relief of Ivriz, the monuments, mostly scattered on the fringe of the highland, have to be ascribed to the Imperial Age (1450–1200 B.C.). Their geographic distribution allows some conclusions as to the extent of the Hittite sphere of influence. The question of the monuments' function is but one of the numerous problems still to be solved.

Apart from the reliefs of Yazılıkaya, Gavurkalesi and Fıraktin, which are all part of a sanctuary, the majority of the monuments at first sight seem to have been put up to demonstrate political power and may be interpreted as representations of the kings (Imamkulu, Taşcı, Gezbeli, Sirkeli and Hemite) or of local dynasts (Karabel and Manisa). This applies especially to the reliefs of Gezbeli and Hemite, which in their overall conception are so designed that the political element seems to dominate over the religious. Upon closer examination, however, we must admit that this explanation applies only perhaps to some of the Imperial Age monuments; those monuments in which the kings are shown in an attitude of prayer or as gods appear to have been erected with religious motives in mind. A further indication of religious function is the fact that the monuments are often associated with water in the form of a spring or a river.

Excavations at the coastal Cilician city of Anemurium (Eski Anamur) have recently brought to light a significant well-deposit containing pottery, lamps, coins and miscellaneous metal objects. The well appears to have been deliberately filled in on one occasion for reasons that we cannot now ascertain. The homogeneous nature of the deposit is indicated by the fact that joining sherds come indiscriminately from all levels in the deposit. Since all the pieces from any one vessel are generally not present and the majority of sherds are body sherds from amphorae for which there are no necks, handles or bases, it would seem that those charged with the task of filling in the well took whatever was closest to hand for their work and it is quite fortuitous that almost whole vessels came to be included in the deposit.

The terminus post quem for the act of filling in the well is provided by two coins of Heraclius belonging to the years A.D. 629–630 and 630–631. The evidence of coins also points to widespread abandonment of the city c. A.D. 660, although the appearance of a few coins belonging to the last decades of the seventh century seems to indicate a limited degree of continued occupation.

In the small collection of antiquities in the Municipality building (Belediye) of Taşköprü, in the vilayet of Kastamonu, there is a Latin inscription which is said to have been recently brought from the Karasayit Cami (formerly the Kurşunlu Mektep) in Taşköprü itself. It was declared on the authority of the Belediye Reisi, Bay Mustafa Yılmaz to whom I am greatly indebted for his help and assistance, that the stone had been recovered from the foundations of the old school. The stone was carried, it may be presumed, from the site of Pompeiopolis, situated across the river, immediately above the Ottoman bridge. I saw the inscription on 4th October, 1976, in company with Bay Nurettin Çakir, Assistant at the Antiquities Museum of Kastamonu, while carrying out, on behalf of the RECAM project, that section of the programme which concerns Kastamonu and Taşköprü.

The inscription is well cut and the lettering is good. The stone is chipped at the front on both the left and the right edges but the top and sides have not been broken. The lower part of the inscription, however, is lost. The space and, therefore, the number of letters to be restored on each edge can be estimated by extrapolating a line from the two sides of the block.

Among the new inscriptions which have come to light during the Oenoanda surveys of 1974 to 1977 is a group of four which are of particular interest in view of their subject matter and place of origin on the site. All were found close together in 1975, among recently overthrown and heavily disturbed ruins of a building or buildings constructed against a cliff face on the lower, north-western slopes of the site. These ruins lie some 300 m. northwards along the hill-side from a set of rock-cut tombs, which were first reported by Rudolf Heberdey and Ernst Kalinka in their monograph of 1897. One inscription from this group had already been published by Maurice Holleaux and Pierre Paris in 1886 and names Κατάγραφος son of Ἀρτέμων as ἱερεύς πρὸ πολέως Λητοῦς διὰ βίου.