In October 1968 at the request of the Ephor of Crete and Director of the Herakleion Museum, Dr. Stylianos Alexiou, the author supervised an emergency excavation arising from plans to install a water sump or ‘bothros’ below a cement-paved patio in front of the property of N. Savakis at Knossos. The site lies immediately to the east of the main road to the village, at a point almost opposite the entrance leading to the School's ‘Taverna’ and the Villa Ariadne. It is of interest for its location towards the northern limits of the Minoan town; for evidence of habitation in the vicinity during the Middle Minoan to Late Minoan periods, if not perhaps earlier and later; for a destruction here by fire possibly in the LM IIIA 1 period; and for the finds which turned up—notably of several fragmentary or restorable LM II and LM III vases (nos. 1–7) and of a remarkable ‘miniature’ fresco fragment (Fig. 3a and Plate 3a–b). As only a passing mention has previously appeared, a more detailed account of this site follows.

Among the trays of fresco-fragments from Sir Arthur Evans's excavations at Knossos, now stored in the Herakleion Museum, there are several only tentatively ascribed to that site. They fall into two groups according to Dr. Helga Reusch's reorganization of the material in 1961: trays HM 111–60 are labelled ‘Knossos’, but HM 161–9 and 239–40 are marked ‘Knossos?’. Of both groups Dr. Reusch has rightly noted: ‘Ohne nähere Angabe der Fundstelle’. In January 1975 the Director of the Herakleion Museum, Dr. Stylianos Alexiou, kindly permitted Mr. Cameron to re-examine the Knossian material and a brief review of the trays under discussion was conducted on that occasion. Their general ascription to Knossos seemed acceptable except for two trays of which the contents looked anomalous by Knossian norms.

Five Late Minoan tombs have been excavated at Sellopoulo, near Knossos. Much the richest of these, excavated in 1967 by M. R. Popham, was the unpillaged Tomb 4, whose three burials were accompanied by a rich array of gold and other jewellery, bronze vessels and weapons, and pottery. This pottery established the date of the burials within the Late Minoan II-early IIIA phase. Furthermore, the tomb contained a scarab of Amenophis III, whose reign extended from c 1420 to 1385 B.C., according to the high Egyptian chronology, c 1405–1375/70 B.C. according to the low chronology.

In January 1974 traces of a built tomb were found in the angle between the Knossos and Fortetsa roads, close to the Venizeleion Hospital (Fig. 1). A bulldozer had been cutting out a driveway on the south side of the Tzatzadakis house, between it and the adjacent olive grove (plan, Fig. 1) when the discovery was made. At the request of Dr. St. Alexiou, Ephor of Antiquities for Crete, a rescue excavation was carried out from 11 to 15 February 1974 by H. W. Catling, for the British School. The trenches were refilled immediately after the excavation.

Coming as they do from one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the frieze-blocks of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus are among the most celebrated sculptures in the British Museum. In the century since their acquisition, many mutually contradictory attempts have been made to attribute the various slabs to the four sculptors of the Mausoleum as named by Pliny: Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos, and Leochares. Most of these attributions have been made by scholars working away from London, apparently chiefly from photographs. A new study of the slabs themselves suggests that the establishment of the integrity of the sculpture is an essential preliminary to the ‘higher criticism’ that has been practised so assiduously. It is therefore the purpose of this note to examine the various fragments that have been attached to the slabs from time to time, and to try to determine whether these joins can be accepted. As Curtius said, ‘Primum monumenta, deinde philosophia’.

In BSA lxviii I discussed some fragments belonging to a Mycenaean deep bowl krater on which a chariot and a parasol can be identified (Plate 8a). The fragments come from the Citadel House area at Mycenae and date to LH IIIB. The attempt to reconstruct the original representation on the vase centred on the position of the parasol, whether it was inside or outside the chariot. The former was considered the more likely possibility, partly in the light of a few Mycenaean terracotta chariot models which feature parasols. A precise reconstruction could not be made owing to the extremely fragmentary nature of the krater.

In his concluding article in a recent series published in Kadmos, Professor Palmer, in considering Popham's study of the destruction of the Palace of Knossos, first questions, and then rejects, the existence of an earth baulk in the North Entrance Passage, said to lie immediately outside the opening to the west, which now houses the steps leading up on to the Bull Relief Portico. As Palmer notes, the existence of the ‘baulk’ and its identification as the source of the 1913 Test Pit 79 material was first put forward in 1960 by Boardman on the strength of evidence found among photographs by Sir Arthur Evans, which are now stored in the Ashmolean Museum.

The special nature of the material makes peculiar difficulties for any attempt to place the Knossos frescoes in a chronological series. In theory, a lower bracket is set by the stratigraphic associations with which the work is found; an upper bracket is determined by the date at which the building or room which the frescoes decorated was constructed; within the brackets refinements are made where they are suggested by stylistic comparisons with other material. For a large number of our examples, however, including most of the fragments from the Palace at Knossos, the stratigraphie evidence is indecisive, the structural phases are conjectural, and the stylistic considerations open to doubt.

The pottery which forms the main subject of this article was found during the 1964 and 1968 Citadel House excavations beneath the floor of two rooms that were designated Rooms 21 and 22. All the pottery from Room 22 has been kept, including the unpainted sherds, so that the group can be analysed numerically and compared with other groups of LH IIIB pottery from the Argolid. It contains a small quantity of painted wares and a large group of undecorated pottery of which a few whole profiles can be restored. The importance of the deposit is that the painted wares provide a date for the building of the South House and thus for the sequence of building in the whole area. Moreover, they give a further selection of patterns current in LH IIIB 1; these show that the group is perhaps a little later than that from Room 3.

I have now had time to study the interesting paper, ‘The Temple of Poseidon’, in which W. B. Dinsmoor Jr. corrects other recent studies, including two of my own, of this famous temple on Cape Sunium. He reassembles the cornice-blocks, so far as he can, and attempts restorations of the roof-gutters above them and the pteron ceilings behind them. I admire the ability and envy the good fortune with which he has turned to good account long stretches of time and the resources and goodwill of apothekai; and I think he has argued convincingly for geison-blocks virtually square in plan at all four corners of the building, much more natural as these are than the oblong blocks which were all that Orlandos and I myself could get. It is interesting, too, that he should add yet another transferred ingredient to the Temple of Ares in the Agora.

During the summer of 1975 several rescue excavations at building sites in the Knossos area were undertaken by the British School, at the request of the Heraklion ephorate of antiquities. In the two areas investigated, Protogeometric or Geometric tombs and tomb deposits were found. The krater published here comes from one of these, and was found in a partly destroyed chamber tomb at Tekke (now Ambelokipi) about one kilometre to the north of Knossos. The site is near the Tekke crossroads, no more than 15 metres from the main Knossos to Heraklion road, on the south side of the minor road, and in the property of A. Kiladhi, plan FIG. 1. The tombs or pottery deposits labelled A to D on this plan, though productive, were in most cases disturbed, and need further study before publication is possible; we are here concerned only with Tomb E.

It is symptomatic of the study of the archaeology of Crete that Pendlebury took 255 pages to cover the Minoan period of about 2,000 years but only 74 pages for the remaining 1,750 years, with a mere 22 pages devoted to the Hellenistic and Roman periods, from c. 300 B.C. to the Arab conquest in the early ninth century A.D., a period of 1,100 years. Needless to say, the importance of Crete in the Minoan age was infinitely greater than in these later periods, but they are still worthy of study, both for their intrinsic interest and to aid our understanding of Cretan history over all.

The intention of this paper is to argue the rejection of IG v1. 515 as another forgery fabricated by the French antiquary Michel Fourmont (1690–1746), in collusion with his nephew, Claude-Louis Fourmont (1703–80). The text, known only from the five copies of it preserved among Fourmont's papers in the Département des Manuscrits at the Bibliothèque Nationale, was first published by Raoul-Rochette in 1819, and subsequently incorporated by Boeckh in CIG i (no. 1338) and Kolbe in IG v1. Its authenticity has never been questioned. The provenance ascribed to the text by Fourmont, the temple of Apollo Amyklaios, may be dismissed at the outset as false, in so far as there is no question of his having found this sanctuary (there was no temple as such).

1. During a visit to Perachora in April 1975 a new fragment of the runnel or water channel running from the top of the deep shafts to the storage chambers was observed. It consists of a fragmentary block of the local hard limestone, with a partly preserved water-proof lining. It had evidently been ploughed up from the field immediately to the north of the easternmost deep shaft. The total original width of the block was 0·32 m. The original length is not preserved. It has now been taken to the Perachora museum.