Most of the material published in this study is at present housed in the National Museum at Athens or in the museum at Eretria. It was excavated by the Greek Archaeological Service and under the direction of Kourouniotes over the period of years 1897–1917; annual reports were published in PAE. The vases which Kourouniotes published in AE 1903 and the black figure amphorae published by Laurent in AE 1901 were taken to Athens, together with all the complete subgeometric and orientalising grave amphorae and a number of other fragments now in an apotheke of the National Museum. The remainder, mainly sherds, was left in a small museum at Eretria. Unfortunately the pottery in Eretria has suffered in the course of time. No record of provenance has been kept and tomb groups are confused; complete profiles are hard to find as many plain fragments of body or foot had been thrown away or have since been lost. Much also had not been thoroughly cleaned, hence the hitherto unnoticed inscriptions on the archaic amphora (no. 17, p. 43 below).

During excavations in Euboea from 1906 to 1911, the late G. Papavasileiou opened twenty Late Helladic tombs near Khalkis, the contents of which are in the museum at Khalkis. He published the finds from two of these, Trypa I and II, in his Περὶ τῶν ἐν Εὐβοία̣ ἀρχαίων τάφων (1910), 21 ff., but the contents of the remaining eighteen were not published owing to the excavator's death in 1917. At the suggestion of Professor A. J. B. Wace I applied for, and in 1939 was given, permission to photograph and publish them. To Professor Wace, who has very kindly read the catalogue and made valuable corrections in dating some of the pots, I owe my grateful thanks for inspiration and encouragement, and I thank the Greek Ministry of Education (particularly Professor Marinatos) for assistance in giving me access to the material. I have not been able to check the catalogue at Khalkis.

I. In 1890 Puchstein published in Humann-Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasien und Nordsyrien, 368 ff., a sculptured and inscribed stele from Selik, a village nine and a half kms. north of Samsat (Samosata), bearing on the front face a relief representing Heracles greeting King Antiochus I of Commagene, an almost exact copy of one of the Nemrud-Daǧ reliefs. The stele has been used as an oil-press, and the inscribed surface of the back has been entirely removed for much of its extent. The text of the inscription, in which Antiochus establishes various cult-practices connected with himself, is not complete in itself, but contains the last forty-seven lines of a document which must have begun on another stele, possibly that of which there has been published a fragment, found at Palas, thirty kms. south-west of Selik.

Of the three new fragments of IG II2 10 here discussed, the two most important (Plate 27, a–b, Fig. 1) were identified in 1948 by Mr. George A. Stamires. The third fragment is the inscription published as IG II2 2403.

IG II2 10 (EM 8147; Fig. 2) was found on the Acropolis and published by Ziebarth, AM XXIII 27–34. The two contiguous fragments identified by Mr. Stamires had been used as the impost of a column in an early Christian church and ornamented with a cross between two acanthus leaves (Plate 27, c). Professor Soteriou, of the Byzantine Museum, Athens, dated the sculpture, from a drawing, to the early part of the fifth century after Christ. In November 1947 the fragments were in the museum at Aigina, and Dr. Gabriel Welter informed me that he had found them on the slope of Kolonna Hill, near the so-called Temple of Aphrodite, in August 1942.

I have read with great interest and profit Mr. J. M. Cook's admirably full and lucid account (BSA XLV 261 ff.) of the operations conducted by him at Kalyvia Sokhas, three or four miles south of Sparta, in November, 1949. It recalled to mind my first visit to the site, in company with Mr. R. Carr Bosanquet, then Director of the British School, in December, 1903, in the course of a preliminary survey of Sparta and its neighbourhood with a view to the commencement of serious work by the School in the following year. It also revived the memory of the occasion when, at the close of July, 1904, I left Sparta, alone and on foot, before dawn, breakfasted with hospitable friends at Kalyvia, and climbed thence to the peak of Taÿgetus, where I spent a sleepless but memorable night, tramping back to Sparta via Kalyvia on the following day through sweltering heat and stifling dust.

By ‘Clazomenian’ is usually meant what seems to be the main group of East Greek pottery decorated in a mature b.f. style. It is most obviously distinguished from Attic, on which it is partly dependent, by its greater tendency to decorative forms and details, as for example in the more extensive use of rows of white dots, and by such favourite motives as sirens and scales containing white drops. The home of Clazomenian is in northern Ionia: from Samos southwards, where its counterpart is the reserving and more traditional pottery known as Fikellura, no important b.f. school developed.

The first and still the only big find of Clazomenian pottery was made by W. M. Flinders Petrie in 1886 at Tell Defenneh in Egypt: most of this find went to the British Museum and a selection of the pieces was promptly and fairly published in 1888. In this publication Petrie, though not expert in Greek archaeology, noted the unity of the group, but—mainly (I suspect) on grounds of frequency—considered it to be a local Greek product of Tell Defenneh.

Many visitors to Crete have enjoyed Dr. Giamalakes' hospitality in Heraklion and have seen the very fine collection of antiquities found on Cretan soil which he has gathered together, and it is with a lively sense of gratitude that, on his suggestion, I make some part of that collection known to those who have not had the good fortune to see it. Most of the collection is Minoan; but I begin with some of the most characteristic products of Hellenic Crete, the archaic relief pithoi.

My descriptions are based on Dr. Giamalakes' own account of his pieces. The photographs are due to Mr. N. Lambrinides.

These pieces offer a useful supplement to the known corpus of Cretan archaic relief pithoi. The oldest is probably 2. Certainly it exhibits an earlier composition, and is closer to Oriental models, than any of the others. A fragment of pithos from Afrati, Ann. X–XII, fig. 45, 48, has a similar representation, which might come from the same mould. For the composition compare a fragment of a stamped pithos from Perachora, with two lions on their hind legs, separated by a floral ornament. Cf. also for the composition the pithos fragment from Plati, BSA XX, pl. 5c lower, which is also like in the proportions of the animals (there headless).

A peculiarity of the class of Greek pottery which used to be called Naucratite but is now generally recognised as Chiot is the frequency of dedicatory inscriptions painted before firing. All told, we have parts of about two hundred specimens, from the sanctuaries of various deities at Naucratis, of Apollo Phanaios in Chios, and of Aphaia in Aegina. Though most are very short, they form the only compact collection of early East Greek writing, and it is surprising that no comprehensive study of them has yet been published.

I. The Pots: The shapes on which these inscriptions occur are with very few exceptions the so-called chalice and the phiale, the two Chiot shapes which were most often dedicated. Regrettably the chronology of Chiot vase-painting is not yet closely fixed, and the inscribed sherds—partly because the finds have been very fragmentary—rarely preserve any elaborate decoration. But some general remarks may be hazarded. (1) The dark inside of most of the inscribed sherds, whether from chalices or phialae, is decorated with vegetable or abstract patterns in purple and white: this decoration seems to develop in the early sixth century.

‘Their land lies towards the open sea—and this is the part which is called Triopion—but begins at the Bybassian Chersonese; and the whole of the Cnidia except for a little bit is surrounded by water, the part facing the north wind being bounded by the Ceramic Gulf, and that on the south by the sea towards Syme and Rhodes. This little bit, then, which is about five stades across, the Cnidians began to dig while Harpagus was conquering Ionia, with the intention of making their land an island. The whole of it was to lie inside; for where the Cnidian land terminates at the mainland, there is the isthmus which they began to dig’ (Hdt. I 174).

The Cnidian peninsula measures 63 km. from base to tip. It consists of two mountain masses joined by an isthmus not much more than 2 km. broad. That on the east is rugged and almost uninhabited; but the greater western massif, though barren and sheer on the north side and at the west tip, has fertile land to offer in the small coastal plains of the south and especially in the valley which traverses the interior from Zeytincik to beyond Yaziköy, with its main outlet below Kumyer and a backdoor at Barkaz. A low ridge runs the length of the isthmus with a gentle slope towards the Gulf of Syme and an easy crossing from Reşadiye to the Ceramic Gulf at Körmen Limani.

Even before Greece took over the administration of the Dodecanese, the Ministry of Education in Athens had sent the Director of the Monuments Restoration Service, Professor A. Orlandos of Athens University, to examine the state of the antiquities of the islands. It was thus possible for the local Archaeological Service, soon after the Greek Military Administration was installed in 1947, to start at once repairing the grave damage caused to the ancient monuments of Rhodes during the war. The main damage has been described in the official English publication Works of Art in Greece, the Greek Islands and the Dodecanese (London 1946), issued by the British Committee on the Preservation and Restoration of Works of Art, Archives and other Material in Enemy Hands, as also in the supplement to the above Report by T. W. French in the Annual of the British School at Athens XLIII (1948), 193 ff.

Although so much that has been written about ancient terracotta figurines has concentrated particularly on their arrangement into groups of various kinds, very little attention has been given specifically to the principles necessarily governing any such classification. The object of the present article is to attempt to remedy this neglect in so far as it concerns Greek mould-made terracottas, more especially of the archaic period. This chronological restriction has been thought desirable, partly because of the limitations of my own acquaintance at first hand with material of later date, partly because rather different technical factors do somewhat influence the classification of, for example, Hellenistic terracottas. But it is not to be overlooked that, with suitable modifications, the principles considered here probably have a validity that extends far beyond the archaic period in time and, for that matter, far beyond Greece in area. In the interests of simplicity and clarity it will be necessary to restrict to the basically essential the illustrative material employed and the critical appraisals of classificatory systems used by earlier writers. To offset this brevity let it here be stated that it is expected that the near future will see the publication of the first of a series of detailed studies in which the principles here evolved will be applied on a large scale. Technical matters will be dealt with here only in so far as they have a direct bearing on classification.

For three weeks of May–June 1937 excavations of limited extent were conducted at Stavros in northern Ithaca. The main site was a small area immediately below the village square to the south-west, where chance finds by the proprietor of the land, followed in 1936 by a trial excavation, had revealed the presence of Greek graves and a Bronze Age deposit.

Stavros lies on a narrow ridge commanding the bays of Phrikes to the east and Polis to the west. Along this ridge must at all times have run the route from the south of the island to Pelikata and the fertile valley of Kalamos. Below the ridge, to the south west, there is a good water-supply at Asprosykia, where late Helladic sherds are recorded. The existence of large dressed blocks lower down the slope at the head of the valley, and of other blocks and rock-cuttings farther westwards, towards Polis Bay, suggests that a not inconsiderable town stood here in classical times.

These five tombs, discovered by chance during the last two years, have an importance out of all proportion to their size and the wealth of their contents. They comprise (see Map, Fig. 1) (1) at Ayios Ioannis, a solitary ‘shaft-grave’ with bronze weapons of early Late Minoan type, but no vases; and (2) on the site of the new Hospital, a group of four tombs (three ‘chamber-tombs’ and a ‘shaft-grave’) containing bronze weapons, together with Late Minoan II vases which provide much fresh information about the pottery of the period.

None of the five tombs had held more than one, or at the most two, bodies: that at Ayios Ioannis, and all except Tomb I on the Hospital site, evidently belonged to warriors buried with their arms. The bronze helmet from Tomb V (see p. 256 and Plates 50–52) is not only the first of the Bronze Age from Crete, but the only one of its type from the Aegean; and it has important bearings upon the origins of early metal helmets in the rest of Europe to the west and north.

I wish to add some points to the description of IG I2 609 which I gave in BSA XLV (1950), 140 ff. The plate number and page references in the following will refer to that article.

(1) I do not now think that the traces reported by Wilhelm on the right edge of fragment ƒ (p. 144 and Plate 11 a) are definite enough to suggest a particular or indeed any letter. The bracketing in my version (p. 160) should therefore be amended to:

ὄ[νομ᾿ ἐστεφάνοσεν⋮]

Mr. M. Mitsos and Mr. E. Vanderpool have kindly checked this point for me on the stone and agree.

The claim put forward as an opinion (BSA XLIV (1949), 307) and as a fact (ibid. 309, fig. 1, 4) that an ‘Early Helladic Patterned’ sherd from Pelikáta is really ‘East Greek’ should be accepted only with considerable reserve.

The condition of the sherd is such as to make positive identification either as one or the other impossible, but the context leaves little room for doubt that it is another Early Helladic Patterned sherd of which five other examples were found in the same layer associated with an E.H. pithos burial. The pattern is familiar from other Early Helladic sites, and if no precise analogy for the shape has so far been recorded, this can hardly be considered a serious objection, unless we are to suppose that all Early Helladic shapes are already known.

The twelfth and subsequent volumes of SEG will take the form of an annual review of Greek Epigraphy. As far as possible it will give references to work done during each year on or relating to Greek inscriptions, and will reprint new or emended texts. The arrangement of the contents will be by geographical areas, on the general pattern of the early volumes of SEG. The editor and publishers of SEG are confident that this will be a service which epigraphists, and classical scholars generally, will appreciate and find helpful.

The editor of SEG would, therefore, be grateful if scholars who publish studies on Greek Epigraphy or substantially using epigraphic material, would send him a notice (or if possible a reprint) of their work. Their co-operation in this way would be much appreciated, and would greatly aid him and the publishers in making SEG as complete as possible.