As far as it was possible to forecast the Campaign of 1902 on the Palace site of Knossos it promised to be one of finishing up in a limited quarter of the East Slope, with some further delimitation of already fairly ascertained boundaries. But appearances were deceptive. Not only did the work of excavating the remainder of the deep-lying rooms of the Central part of this quarter prove to be of extraordinary difficulty, owing to the masses of heavy superstructures that it was necessary to support, but the building was found to extend further down the slope than the preliminary trial pits had led us to expect. In several cases these had just missed important walls, with the result that vast masses of excavated materials had, towards the close of the previous campaign, been dumped down in places from which they had this year to be removed at the cost of much labour. It was also found that several of the chambers previously excavated along the edge of the second East Slope Terrace—notably those near the Olive Press—overlaid basement areas containing important remains, and these, in turn, the floor levels of a still earlier Palace, covered with pottery of the pure ‘Kamáres’ class.

§ 1. There follow two transliterations, in the first of which I have put down only those letters which seem to me now absolutely certain (from the photograph, the impression, and Mr. Bosanquet's notes); the letters underlined are slightly injured but still clear. In the second I have indicated all the readings which seem to me to be reasonably probable from the indications of the impression, corrected by Mr. Bosanquet's reading of the stone wherever he felt it was certain. Where his repeated examination left him still in some doubt, it seems wisest to leave the text suggested by the impression, as giving at least possible alternatives. In the second transcription only those letters are underlined which appear to me open to some degree of doubt.

It may well be that in the idea of Herodotus and his contemporaries, that the gods of Greece came originally from Egypt, there lies a consciousness of a fact, and that there was latent in the Greek mind a vague idea that their civilization had, far back in the mists of time, come into contact with that of Egypt, and even that some of its characteristics were of Egyptian origin. Leaving out of account the question of the possible African origin of ‘Mycenaean’ culture, and so ultimately of much of the civilization which we know as ‘Greek,’ we can now say with certainty that we know that Greek culture had, a thousand years before Herodotus, been brought into contact with the already three thousand year old civilization of Egypt, and that this contact was a comparatively close one, and one which cannot fail to have resulted in a perceptible modification of the less-developed and younger culture. We now know that this contact was closest in the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C., when the kings of the XVIIIth Dynasty reigned over Egypt.

In the present paucity of archaic sculpture from Northern Asia Minor (from Cyzicus we have only the beautiful fragment of a chariot relief at Tchinly Kiosk) the much damaged relief of Heracles here reproduced (Plate IV. i) is not without its value. It was discovered during the demolition of the old Armenian Church at Aidinjik, a village about an hour from Cyzicus, on the mainland west of the isthmus: thanks to Mr. Th. Makrys of Panderma, who providentially brought me to the spot, it has now been removed to the safety of the Imperial Museum.

By the kind permission of Mr. Leonardos I am enabled to publish the following inscriptions, all of which are in the Epigraphic Museum at Athens. They belong to the class of ‘Catalogi Paterarum Argentearum,’ of which the already published inscriptions are collected in the Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum, Vol. II., Pt. 2, Nos. 768–776, 776 b; Vol. IV., Pt. 2, Nos. 768 b–776 c (pp. 187–192).

I have looked in vain for any indication of the places at which Nos. II, V., and VII. were found, but as all the other members of the series were discovered on the Acropolis, it is safe to infer the same for these three fragments also.

The excavations at Praesos undertaken by the British School in 1901 were begun on May 7th and continued until July 3rd. The Cretan Exploration Fund contributed £200, the Society of Dilettanti £50, and the Prendergast Fund of Cambridge University £40, towards the cost of the campaign. With me were two members of the School, Mr. J. H. Marshall, of King's College, Cambridge, and Mr. R. Douglas Wells, architect. Mr. Wells made a survey of the city-plateau and the adjoining ravines (Plate VII) and a large number of plans and drawings, many of which accompany this article. Mr. Marshall rendered valuable help in the work of supervision, and undertook a systematic exploration of the surrounding district. I much regret that it has been impossible for him to contribute to this report more than the section on the Megalithic House, printed below (§ 4). Soon after the close of the season he was appointed Director of the Archaeological Survey of India, and has necessarily been absorbed in the duties of that important post. I have had the use of his notes on some of the tombs.

The large find of terra-cottas made by the British School in 1901, and now in the Museum at Candia, having been handed over to me by Mr. Bosanquet for publication, I hope at some future date to give a more detailed and critical account of them. Meanwhile my object here is to give a short account of the find as a whole, dealing at greater length with only a few of the larger and more important discoveries.

On a low spur of the hills that shut in the Sitia valley on the east, immediately overlooking the sea and separated from the port of Sitia by nearly a mile of sand-bar, stands the unimportant hamlet of Petras, originally Venetian, afterwards ‘Turkish’ or Moslem-Cretan, and for the most part ruined and deserted since 1896. Mr. Marshall came here in January, 1901, and collected sherds which left no doubt about the early date of the remains, treated by previous travellers as Hellenic. Lying on a deep bay and commanding as it does the easiest route into the Eteocretan highlands, it seemed likely that Petras might furnish useful clues, if not to the indigenous culture of the district, at any rate to the foreign influences that were at work here during the Bronze Age. Later, when two months of work at Praesos had produced very little Kamáres pottery of the familiar mid-Cretan types and no Mycenaean, it seemed doubly desirable to examine this, the nearest definitely Mycenaean site, and to ascertain what had been the local varieties of early pottery.

Brief reports on the work done by the British School at Palaikastro in April and May 1902 have appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (1902, p. 384) and in Man (1902, No. 119). In the present paper I propose to describe the discoveries made in the cemeteries and in the houses, reserving for a future occasion the discussion of certain problems on which fuller light may be thrown by the excavations of 1903, to be made with larger resources and over an extended area, thanks to a liberal grant from the Cretan Fund and to the unfailing goodwill of Prince George's Government. The past campaign was of a preliminary nature and cost less than £150, including the somewhat serious item of transport, but excluding that of drawings and photographs.