In an article on the difficulty of identifying marbles from the Aegean area Mr. Colin Renfrew and Dr. J. Springer Peacey rightly criticize the careless use by later scholars of the results obtained in 1890 by G. R. Lepsius, who, by cutting thin sections of various marbles and examining them under transmitted light, claimed to be able to identify Pentelic, Hymettan, Parian, Naxian, and, less specifically, ‘Island’ marbles.

It seems, however, that even when applied with care the method is useless, and Renfrew and Peacey will have none of it. ‘The use’, they say, ‘of the terms “Pentelic”, “Hymettan”, “Parian”, “Naxian”, and so forth, applied to ancient sculptures on the basis of simple visual inspection or of microscopic examination of thin specimens, is not justified…. No single characteristic or combination of characteristics is sufficient to identify with certainty the source of a single given specimen…. No reliance can be placed on Lepsius' marble identifications, and even less [sic] on those authors who have ascribed marble to supposed sources on the basis of colour and grainsize…. Those who make them or follow them are perpetuating a myth which is just eighty years old…’

A large body of sherd material, especially where the sherds are small, is often usefully looked at afresh by an eye unjaded by familiarity. Recently, the extensive collection of vase fragments from Naukratis in the British Museum has been brought together for the first time since before the war, and many hundreds of unincorporated sherds have been registered (in the sequence 1965. 9–30). Ideally, the sherds should be grouped by fabrics, but for administrative reasons it was felt necessary to arrange them in order of registration numbers. As this work was being carried out, a great many sherds were found to join. Most were previously joined and often published pieces, which had come apart and been separated over the years (many, indeed, had been registered unnecessarily in 1924 after coming adrift from their numbered companions).

The Role of Cyprus as intermediary between the cities of the Near East and the Aegean world can be studied in many different ways. This article is devoted to Cypriot metal signet rings of Iron Age (pre-Roman) date and the part they play in the story of east and west. It comprises a full publication of the metal rings in Nicosia museum, which I was invited to undertake by Drs. V. Karageorghis and K. Nikolaou, but it includes consideration of other finds from Cyprus now in other collections, and a few other probably Cypriot pieces. For the latter, less-detailed descriptions and references are given.

Since the continuity of culture between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Cyprus is more easily demonstrated than it can be in most other areas of the eastern Mediterranean, it is necessary to begin with a brief account of the all-metal signet rings in use in the island at the end of the Bronze Age, and token illustration is given here to supplement published photographs. The main influence in the shapes of these rings is Egyptian and not Aegean, since the long oval bezels of the rings run with the hoop and not across it, and the rings are all intended for wearing on the fingers, as some have been found in tombs, which is not true of most Aegean signet rings. Three different styles of decoration may be observed. The first is thoroughly Egyptianizing and some pieces are of high quality. The hoops of the rings are stirrup-shaped but occasionally have rounded shoulders, and the bezels are long ovals like cartouches. In these respects they follow Egyptian forms very closely, and it is possible that some are in fact of Egyptian origin. The shape and style of any made in Cyprus may, of course, not have been derived directly from Egypt, but via the Palestine—Syria coast.

Doric architecture seems to have arisen suddenly in Greece. Till the beginning of the seventh century, to judge by excavated remains and models, masonry was rough, roofs were either of thatch and high-pitched or of mud and flat, plans were imprecise, and style was nondescript or non-existent without any hint of the characteristic components of the Doric order. Yet by 630 in the artistically peripheral region of Aetolia the new temple of Apollo at Thermon shows carefully squared stonework (or so it may be inferred), a tiled and therefore low-pitched roof and exact planning; and there are remains of metopes, cornice, simas, and perhaps acroteria—the metopes at least being properly Doric. It is a fair conclusion that improved technique and materials and the consequent transformation of the aspect and proportions of the temple came in about the middle of the seventh century and that the Doric order was invented for this incipient architecture. Certainly there was little time for evolution.

The statuette of a centaur at Plates 8–9 was found during excavations at Lefkandi in Euboea, conducted by the British School at Athens during last summer. Standing 36 centimetres high, it is among the earliest representations of a centaur yet known from the Aegean area, and the largest of terracotta centaurs. Its outstanding interest seemed to the authors to call for a more detailed publication than the normal brief preliminary account of the excavation and its finds.

It has an unusual archaeological history, suggesting that it was a valued object before it was eventually buried in a cemetery at Lefkandi. This cemetery, which lies on a small hill called Toumba, overlooking the modern fishing village of Lefkandi, was an unexpected discovery. Trials were made during 1969 in this vicinity in the hope of finding the Submycenaean and Early Protogeometric settlement which went with the nearby cist graves. The virtual absence of remains of this period on the main town site of ‘Xeropolis’ had led to the belief that at this time the inhabitants may have temporarily moved to the Toumba area, a smaller and more easily defensible hill and one with a natural supply of water. However, our trial there found not the settlement we hoped for, but another cemetery.

Bilingual Greek–Semitic inscriptions have been found at numerous places in the Mediterranean—not only on Cyprus, but also on Malta, on Cos, in Athens, Miletus, and elsewhere—and, though not as numerous as Greek–Latin bilingual texts, are nevertheless of considerable interest both in themselves and also as evidence for the coexistence, in individual cases, of the two cultures. Rhodes, from which the three pieces here republished come, had a large foreign population in the Hellenistic period, but bilingual texts are not common there. It is, however, noteworthy that what is probably the earliest bilingual Greek–Latin inscription, of the third century B.C., comes from Lindos (Inscr. Lind. 92).

I. Plaque of dark grey marble, complete on all sides, H. 0·130, W. 0·243, Th. 0·065, letters (Gk.), 0·018, (Phoen.), 0·010–0·015. Rough-picked on all sides for affixing into stele or similar object, but front part of all sides smooth (Plate 12a).

Found, casually, 1968, in area of eastern necropolis near the church of Panagia Phaneromene. Now in Rhodes Museum, Inv. no. ΠΒΕ 1233.

Greek:

Phoenician:

Some years ago in an article offered in honour of my friend, Dr. Jírí Neustupný, I described three settlements on small off-shore islands round the coasts of South Greece, where some of the native population appear to have taken refuge during the period of the Slav invasions in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. (Fig. 1). In August 1969, when I was in Galaxidhi on the west side of the bay of Itea, Mrs. Lois Ventris told me about a group of islets there with traces of similar occupation. These island refuge settlements of the period of the Slav invasions are of some interest in themselves, and they open the door to what might be a fruitful line of inquiry as regards the problem of the Slav occupation of South Greece.

There are seven islets in all in the bay of Itea, and of these I was able to visit the three nearest to Galaxidhi, namely (1) Panayia, (2) Ayios Yeoryios, and (3) Apsifia (Figs. 2, 3). These three islands all had traces of habitation in the late Roman or early Byzantine period, including pottery assignable to the sixth or early seventh centuries A.D.: notably, fragments of amphorae with straight and wavy grooved decoration (Plate 14d, 4–6), and rims of dishes of fine red (Late Roman B) ware imported from North Africa. These rims (nos. 6–8, 12) belong to dishes of a type (Ant. 802) found in the Late Phase of the Late Roman period at Antioch, lasting from about the middle of the sixth century A.D. into the seventh. I recovered one or two fragments of clay lamps from (1) Panayia (Plate 14d, 1–2), but saw none on the other two islands which I visited. Some of the Roman pottery from (1) Panayia and (2) Ayios Yeoryios appears to date from a time before the Slav invasions. There are also traces of medieval or later occupation here.

Our campaigns of 1967 and 1968 have confirmed and supplemented that of 1960, especially concerning the Late Bronze Age habitation of the Dodecanese. Pottery of Mycenaean type has been found for the first time on Patmos, Leros, and Syme, and further Mycenaean settlements have been identified in the northern part of Kos, at Asklúpi and Palaiópyli. On many sites it has not been possible to determine from the surface finds the exact period of prehistoric habitation, but pre-Mycenaean material has been noted for the first time on the islands of Patmos, Leros, Telos (?), Syme, and Kasos. A particularly interesting early phase is represented by the sherds from Troúlli on Kos. Among the finds from periods subsequent to the Bronze Age, the most interesting are perhaps the Geometric sherds from Kastélli on Patmos and from the Kástro at Pólin on Kasos. A remarkable phenomenon also is the size and strength of the Hellenistic fortifications on some of the smaller islands, namely Patmos, Telos, Syme, and Castellorizo. It would appear that these islands probably enjoyed at this time a prosperity disproportionate to their size and agricultural resources.

The material for the present study was collected during 1963 and 1964, on various expeditions to eastern Arcadia. My original intention was to survey the whole province with regard to its prehistoric occupation; this, however, proved too great a task in the time available, and I was able to cover little more than the highland plains around the Classical cities of Tegea, Mantinea, and Orchomenos. The following work will therefore be mainly concerned with that area, which constitutes eastern Arcadia, although I have also listed the evidence for prehistoric habitation over the remainder of the province as well. I have taken the province to cover the area as described by Pausanias, rather than the present-day administrative unit. This is not an exhaustive survey, even of the area most intensively covered; rather it should be seen as a preliminary work, which will, it is hoped, stimulate interest in further field-work and perhaps excavation in this neglected area of the Peloponnese.

First principles tend to be forgotten in the course of scholarly polemic. At worst the fault lies in the animus and heat engendered. At best it is because the opponents have become absorbed in an elegant game of skill. Meanwhile the problem remains unresolved—whether it is the dating of crucial fifth-century Attic texts or some far less serious point. We must keep our priorities right. What really counts in the ‘three-bar sigma’ controversy, for instance, is the bare text of the epigraphic documents, freed of modern supplement and interpretation. It is vital to start from this often narrow base of certainty. I propose to do just this, with more self-discipline than in the past. For convenience I shall divide my inquiry into six main parts.

This inscription consists of two decrees, one of which gives a certain Sthorys the Athenian citizenship, the other of which provides for a simple amendment. Despite fairly numerous editions, a number of difficulties of detail remain which seem sufficient to warrant a further discussion. In the first place, the most recent editors, Wilhelm and Meritt, while agreeing on the general substance of the text, have a number of discrepancies in their readings, though neither has provided a detailed commentary on the readings adopted. In addition, the full implications of fragment (b) have not been taken into account hitherto. Secondly, Sthorys, the recipient, is a very shadowy figure, and the precise circumstances in which he received Athenian citizenship are not altogether clear. Thirdly, the formula employed for the grant of citizenship in this decree is somewhat unusual compared with that found in other such decrees of the fifth and early fourth centuries. The purpose of this article therefore is, firstly, to provide a new text with a full critical commentary, and also to consider the physical details of the stele; secondly, to consider fully the contents of the two decrees, and in particular the status of Sthorys and the possible reasons for his honours; and finally, to discuss the formula for the grant of citizenship in this decree and in the other preserved examples of the fifth and early fourth centuries.

Two stone tripods—in fact the only known stone tripods of early times—have for many years been in the Museum of Thebes. They are made of the local poros limestone. Even though they have been exhibited, hitherto they have not been cleaned and are virtually unpublished. Villagers found them by chance in the vicinity of Plataea; in 1899 they were handed over to A. Keramopoulos, who was then conducting excavations at Plataea. Keramopoulos, in the same year, wrote a brief note about them, in which he entirely misunderstood their dating. Karouzos included a paragraph about them in his Guide to the Thebes Museum, accompanied by a photograph of one of them.

The first tripod, Thebes 19, is intact (Plates 43, 44a–c; Fig. 1). There are a few breaks on the feet, and in places the surface of the stone has decayed, forming holes of various sizes. The height of the bowl is greater than its width, and its greatest diameter is at the mouth. As for the lip, its outer half is bevelled, its inner half horizontal. The feet are short, plump, and broad; they taper downwards because their inner surfaces, which begin at the bottom of the bowl, splay outwards. The feet are not strictly vertical, but open out slightly towards their base; they reach up to the rim. Their outer surface is slightly curved, roughly following the curve of the lip. There were no handles. The total height is 0·38 m.; the lip has a diameter of 0·31 m. outside, and 0·22 m. inside. The bevelled surface of the lip, the front surfaces of the feet and the upper half of the bowl's outer surface are covered with incised decoration: the motifs consist of zigzags, simple circles, circles with inscribed cross, and concentric circles, almost all with deep holes in the centre.

The interpretations that I offer in the following pages are very tentative, though not, I hope, obscure; and I feel myself wide open to further persuasion on any of them. But unless someone worries some of Vitruvius' more difficult passages and reaches conclusions that are fairly clear, however provisional, we shall make little progress at this stage. His actual text is now surprisingly well known, and Soubiran and Fensterbusch are pushing their labours on it as far as is humanly possible. It is his architecture that now needs discussion. I begin, however, with a small textual question.

I. Vitruvius v. xi. 2

‘In palaestra peristylia, quemadmodum supra scripturm est, ita debent esse perfecte distributa’ (Rose's text). ‘Perfecte’ edd., ‘Perfecta’ GH.

C. Ruffel and J. Soubiran, on p. 29 of their ‘Recherches sur la tradition manuscrite de Vitruve’ in Pallas ix (Toulouse, 1960), suggested that ‘perfecta distributa’ could be a tautology, one word glossing the other.

It does not seem a very obvious gloss to me, and I wonder if the right reading could be ‘perpetua’, in the common Vitruvian sense of ‘continuous’. For this see, e.g., v. i. 10—‘ipsae vero columnae in altitudine perpetua sub trabes’, or ‘the carrying of the columns themselves in unbroken height directly up to the beams’, as Morgan translates it. Or take the Greeks with their ‘emplecton’ wall in II. viii. 7: ‘e suis frontibus perpetuam et unam crassitudinem parietum consolidant. Praeterea interponunt singulos crassitudine perpetua utraque parte frontatos, quos diatonous appellant’, etc.

The pair of Horns of Consecration at Fig. 1 (A) and plate 46a was found at Knossos in 1969 when an area in front of the Stratigraphical Museum was being levelled for the extension of that building. It lay more or less on the surface, but had been covered and protected by the bole of an olive tree; and it was the removal of this tree which brought the object to light.

At first the author suspected that it had been hidden under the tree some years ago by a villager who had chanced to find it elsewhere. But this suspicion was disproved when further clearance revealed a patch of pebble floor on which were two broken ‘incense-burners’ of Late Minoan type. The area had unfortunately been badly disturbed by later pits and building activity; but enough remained both to trace a strip c. 1·50 m. long of the floor, which had been relaid several times, and to indicate that a line of stones bordering it to the west were the remains of one wall of a room contemporary with the floor, Fig. 2. Clearly, therefore, we had found the ruins of a Minoan shrine.

In two recent articles in this periodical the author has considered Late Minoan IIIB and IIIC pottery from Crete. In both these studies, material surviving from Evans' excavation of the Little Palace at Knossos has been mentioned and in part illustrated. It is the main purpose of this article to describe this pottery in greater detail and, at the same time, to take some account of two comparable but small deposits from recent excavations at Knossos. Since only a few vases could be restored from these deposits, use will be made of other material to illustrate whole vases and to give a more complete picture.

The pottery from the Little Palace, which we shall be considering, was excavated by Evans in 1908 and derives mainly from two regions: the rooms south of the Shrine (and adjacent to the main staircase) and the courtyard between this building and the Unexplored Mansion. Neither are closed deposits, for they contain a considerable admixture of L.M. IIIA sherds. It has, therefore, been necessary to select the IIIB pottery on stylistic and not stratigraphical grounds. But knowledge of similar material from better-stratified deposits elsewhere has made this selection less arbitrary than it would otherwise have been. The Little Palace pottery (Plates 47a–f; 48a, b, d; 50b; 51a–f) consists almost entirely of decorated sherds and, clearly, most of the plain fragments were thrown away.

The scope and a summary of the results of the 1962–3 excavations at Palaikastro and their relation to the earlier work of 1902–6 were set out in Part I (BSA lx (1965) 249–52). There is no call to repeat those findings here, nor has further study made it necessary to make any significant revisions.

In this article we publish the Late Minoan IB and reoccupation pottery from Block N (excavation report in PK VI. 252) and from other tests, along with an account of work undertaken in the main area of the town at Palaikastro (Roussolakkos).

As before, the excavation report was written by L. H. Sackett, while M. R. Popham contributed the sections on the L.M. pottery. We are grateful to P. M. Warren for notes on the stone objects and to V. E. G. Kenna for a note on one sealstone.

The material still awaiting final study and publication consists principally of Early and Middle Minoan pottery from Kastri, tests in Block Χ, Block Γ, and Square H3.

Viewed from the promontory of Perachora—and especially by night—there is a great contrast between the southern shores of the Gulf of Corinth and the northern shore of the Halcyonic gulf. To the south an almost continuous line of habitation is clearly visible—to the north, only the darkness of a coast where the mountains appear to drop directly into the sea. These mountains constitute a considerable barrier, beginning with the greatest of them, Helicon, to the west, set a little inland: next, on the very edge of the sea, Korombili; and then, further over to the east, the outliers of Cithaeron, which leave only the notoriously difficult route round the coast to Aegosthena by which a Spartan army precariously escaped. It is not surprising that the cities of the Boeotian hinterland largely turned their backs on the sea: except for certain events, to be considered below, this coast played little part in Boeotian history.

There are three significant harbours, or usable beaches, along this Boeotian coast (Fig. 1a). To the east, at the end of the bay between Cithaeron and Korombili is the beach of Livadhostro, the ancient Creusis. It is not a good beach, being open and exposed to the wind. Communication with the hinterland is not easy, and there is no modern road. The Thebans, in the year of Leuctra, kept a small fleet there, perhaps through compulsion rather than choice. At the extreme western end of this section of coast is the harbour of Sarandi. Between these two harbours, and to the west of Korombili, is the great landlocked bay of Domvraina. Even within this bay much of the coast is mountainous and abrupt, but there are two small harbours at the western end, and a reasonably large, very well-sheltered beach and harbour at the eastern end.

In recent years a number of vases with floral decoration have come to light, and we can now carry a little further the study of the Euboean floral black-figure style of vase-painting started in BSA lv. 211 f. Unfortunately few have any known provenience and it is often hazardous to attempt to distinguish between the work of Euboean and Boeotian workshops. Some of the Euboean attributions here made are tentative, and even when they can be regarded as certain the question of the distribution of the vases within Euboea still remains largely unsolved.

An early example of a vase with decoration that consists entirely of floral elements is a pelike in Athens, Plate 69a, with provenience given in the inventory as ‘Chalcis?’. It has bands of myrtle, ivy, and a kind of laurel with spatulate leaves covering the neck and the upper part of the body, and can be regarded as a precursor of the floral style. It is to be distinguished from it chiefly by the absence of the palmette, which is the chief ingredient of the floral style proper. The stemless ivy leaves accompanied by spots recall the sixth-century skyphos of Chalcidian make, Rhitsona 31. 41 (BSA lviii. 18, pl. 2. 3), and the little stemmed kothon, Athens E1520 (Ibid. pl. 2. 8).

The British School at Athens has had in its possession for many years now a number of fragments of Greek relief sculpture, mostly from funerary or votive monuments. The origin of these sculptures is obscure, but it seems likely that they were collected by the historian George Finlay, probably during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is the purpose of this article to publish photographs and details of some of the more important fragments, and also to attempt to date them and to interpret the scenes which they show.

S.7. Plate 73a. A fragment from the lower right corner of a relief. H. 0·27 m., W. 0·45 m., Th. 0·17 m., Depth of relief 1 cm. Pentelic marble. Part of the right-hand edge of the relief remains, where it can be seen that there was no side frame. Below, there is a simple plinth or ground-line with a flat surface, and beneath this a rougher receding margin of about the same width, perhaps where the relief was inserted into a base