Strzygowski, in his short account of the ninth-century church of the Dormition at Skripou-Orchomenos, made no mention of the evidence for a contemporary screen. Some of the fragments were visible in his time, for they had previously been recorded, though not published, by Barnsley. It was not until 1932 that the character of the screen was first made known by Maria Soteriou's study of the building, in which three of the marble fragments surviving from it were illustrated. The repertory of ornament used on these fragments was seen to be identical with that employed on the string-courses and cornices of the church itself, which left no doubt that the screen was an integral part of the building erected by the protospatharius Leo in 873/4. More recently, Professor Grabar has contributed an invaluable study of the style of ornament with which both church and screen were enriched.

The gaps in our knowledge of Bronze Age Euboea are so serious as to amount in some areas to a total blank. This is equally true of the periods immediately preceding and following the Bronze Age and has been commented on by a number of writers concerned with regional surveys. There remains a marked disparity between the state of our information and both the importance suggested by literary tradition and the archaeological potential of so well-placed and fertile an island.

These notes are intended both as a supplement to, and as a partial correction of, my former article in this Annual, in the light of recent fieldwork in south-western Peloponnese, and of current views on the geography and place names of the Pylos Tablets. We now know that Mycenaean settlement was widespread throughout the Pamisos Valley of eastern Messenia and the western shores of the Messenian Gulf. And from the Pylos documents it has been deduced that the ‘Further Province’ of Pylos probably lay in eastern Messenia. These factors necessitate a reassessment of the Homeric tradition, particularly as regards the locations of the Seven Cities offered by Agamemnon to Achilles. I shall begin by summarizing the new archaeological information, in so far as it is relevant to the locations of the Seven Cities, before attempting an historical correlation.

The triglyph problem which arose at the corners of a Doric building, and was held by Vitruvius to be responsible for the disuse of the Doric order in Roman times, has for many years been discussed by archaeologists. The best short explanation of the difficulties involved is probably that by Robertson. The much more complex problems which are met at a re-entrant angle in the Doric order, have, on the other hand, received little attention, for such angles do not occur in temples, the type of building which has been studied most thoroughly. They do, however, appear fairly frequently in more utilitarian buildings such as stoas and palaistras, and various treatments of them were evolved.

In January 1965 Mr. Sinclair Hood came upon a flint knife in a box of pottery in the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos from the West ‘kouloura’ house in the West Court, which he kindly referred to me to publish. The knife is unrecorded, and is a unique import of its type into the Aegean in the Bronze Age, if it did reach Crete in Middle Minoan times. On the assumption that it did, it must have been passed over by Pendlebury, who excavated with his wife the ‘kouloura’ houses.

The British School's excavations in collaboration with the Libyan Department of Antiquities at Tocra (ancient Taucheira) have demonstrated that this colony was founded very soon after the traditional date for the foundation of Cyrene itself (631 B.C.). In connexion with the excavations the present writer and Mr. John Hayes, who is publishing the pottery from Tocra, took the opportunity to collect evidence of the earliest Greek finds on other sites in Cyrenaica to see whether earlier foundation dates than those generally proposed were possible for these also.

A preliminary report of this tomb, dug by Bosanquet in 1902, appeared in BSA viii. 303–5, where it was termed the ‘Beehive Tomb’. This was a misleading term for what was in fact a rock-cut chamber tomb with a dromos. The contents of the tomb listed in that report were not subsequently published in full, although individual items have since been considered of sufficient importance to merit especial attention by scholars. It seems, therefore, worth while to publish all the surviving items of this interesting tomb group, and to re-examine the L.M. IIIA 2 early date assigned to it by Furumark.

‘It is a singular fact regarding the eparkhia of Agios Vasiles, that throughout its whole extent not any ancient city has been discovered; and yet there can be no doubt that in one or two of the most populous of these valleys there must have been a town of more or less importance. To all my inquiries, however, in my two journeys through the greater part of the province, I could learn of no ruins or traditional site of any Hellenic city. … Notwithstanding this denial, I am induced to call the attention of any future traveller to this absence of any recognized ancient site in so large a district …’ So Captain Spratt at the end of the second volume of his Travels and Researches in Crete, published in 1865.

The harbour was described briefly by Payne. As he says, the enclosed part is extremely small and now much silted up. Even if it was much deeper in antiquity it can never have had room for more than two or three boats, and we may presume that ships normally anchored outside in the small bay, protected from the north and north-west wind, and only entered the harbour to disembark men or goods. No large ships could have entered the harbour at all; the small craft (lembi) used to ferry Philocles' force across to Lechaion in 198 B.C. would have been most suitable.

The vase belongs to a group of coarse white limestone vessels usually thought to be libation tables or tables of offering. J. Boardman has, however, suggested that two examples of this form from the Dictaean Cave may be lamp- or torch-holders because the interiors are cubical, completely cut out, with a stepped cutting on the interior base which might have served as a lamp-or torch-socket. The marks of smoke or burning on the Patsos vase would support this view, but there are several points against it. The deep, square-cut interior is hardly suitable as a lamp-holder, Minoan lamps having small round bases. On the other hand the ‘socket’ cut in the interior bases of these vases is shallow, probably not deep enough to support a torch.

A tour round the churches of Volissos, made with Mr. J. Boardman in 1961, revealed a number of unpublished inscriptions which I am setting out here together with two known texts which we were able to review. With one exception (no. 6) they are of Roman date; with two exceptions (nos. 4 and 6) repulsive to look at. Some of them are, however, quite substantial texts and the concentration of so many documents of this same period at Volissos may be significant.

The triglyph altar to the east of the sixth-century temple of Hera Akraia was only cursorily published in the first volume of Perachora (pp. 89–91; pls. 6 and 130). No real discussion was offered of the columns, apparently Ionic, placed carefully around it, which R. Martin considers, not unreasonably, evidence for a sort of baldacchino, surely one of the earliest known (see note below). I was lately asked to study altar and columns in more detail, and visited Perachora in March 1965 for the purpose. I concluded that the altar had no ritual connexion with the stoa to the east of it, but was a typical archaic temple-altar, its length (pace Perachora i. 89, which makes it but 5 metres long) originally comparable to the width of the temple. So it could be restored as about 8 metres long, or, including the columnar surround, about 10 metres. The pair of columns on its north side are nearly aligned with the temple's north wall, and it is possible, with four columns spaced at comparable intervals on the west side, to obtain an alignment nearly as close between its south side and the temple's south wall.

The L.H. IIIB deposits from Mycenae fall into two distinguishable groups. The earlier, called L.H. IIIB 1, is represented by the pottery from the destruction level in the houses east of the modern road and south of the tomb of Clytemnestra. The destruction to which we owe these deposits appears to have occurred late in the L.H. IIIB 1 phase, and probably also affected the houses on the Atreus ridge. The later group, classified as L.H. IIIB 2, has been found in buildings within the Citadel and also in isolated contexts outside the walls. The deposits from within the Citadel come from the debris of a second, more widespread, destruction which affected other centres as well as Mycenae. The differentiation of the two periods was confirmed in the Citadel House area by the finding of deposits of L.H. IIIB 2 stratified above others of L.H. IIIB 1 character. The pottery of both these phases from the Citadel House will be published in the general account of the excavations which have taken place in that area since 1959. The detailed publication of the whole vases from the L.H. IIIB 1 destruction level of the houses outside the walls is planned for the next article in this series.

The positions and the extent of these kingdoms have been disputed in the past, especially by Droysen, Zippel, Meyer, and Beloch, and they are the subject now of an interesting and well-documented paper by F. Papazoglou, entitled ‘Les origines et la destinée de l'état Illyrien: Illyrii proprie dicti’. His conclusions are that there was a specific political ‘Organization’ called ʾΙλλυριοί that almost all the known kings of Illyria—he gives fifteen of them between 400 and 167 B.C.—were rulers of this organization; and that this organization was not the one and only tribal organization known by this specific name, the ‘Illyrii proprie dicti’ of Pliny, HN iii. 144 and P. Mela ii. 55. In the course of the paper he does not mention any use of the term ʾΙλλυριοί before 423 B.C.; he shows no knowledge of the topography of the areas and little concern with topography; and he makes some statements which are erroneous, at least in part, e.g. that when Glaucias took the title ‘king of the Illyrians’ the Taulantii disappeared for ever from history—yet he quotes from Livy the terms given to the Taulantii by Rome in 168 B.C. Moreover, his conclusions do not seem to me to be probable.

The building accounts of Epidauros are among the most interesting architectural and economic records of the Classical and Early Hellenistic period. It has rarely been recognized that they deserve to rank alongside the Athenian, Delphian, and Delian inscriptions, but although the Epidaurian material is slighter in bulk than the Delian, and covers a smaller area (politically and economically speaking) than the Athenian, it provides a far more comprehensive picture of that most important cultural activity, temple building. The Epidaurian inscriptions indicate the means by which one Greek city converted its sanctuary into a panhellenic cult-centre, that of the healing god Asklepios, during a period of a hundred years or so from about 370 B.C. onwards.