This article focuses on a distinct type of clay vessel which formed part of both the Late Minoan and the Mycenaean repertoire: the amphoroid krater.

In contrast to the Mycenaean version of the shape, with its often elaborate decoration of chariots and other pictorial designs, the Minoan amphoroid krater has up to now not received much attention. The present paper intends to redress this imbalance by exploring the origin and development of the Minoan amphoroid krater, its function(s) and its relationship with its Mycenaean counterpart.

The Linear B administrative texts of Late Bronze Age Greece were written on clay tablets, whose production therefore formed the first stage in the process of document creation, though it generally remains unclear whether the tablets’ writers were also their makers. This study combines experimental archaeology with autopsy of the tablets from Pylos in order to investigate the methods by which the Linear B tablets were created at this site. It thereby sheds light not only on the physical processes involved in shaping the clay, but also on the decisions involved on the part of the tablet-makers, and hence on the relationship between the ‘making’ and ‘writing’ stages of the process of creating the Linear B documents.

During the archaeological survey research project ‘Island Cultures in a Diachronic Perspective: the case of Therasia’, large amounts of pottery were recorded throughout the island of Therasia, ranging in date from the Bronze Age to modern times. Focusing on the prehistoric period, pottery of the Early Cycladic and late Middle Cycladic periods was recovered at Panaghia Koimisis, which is situated on the southern part of the island. This paper presents the petrographic data and results of the analysis carried out on pottery samples which are representative of variable surface treatments and different macro-fabrics of these two prehistoric periods. Tackling issues of provenance and technology, the current scientific analysis attests the coexistence of Theran and off-Theran pottery fabrics already at Panaghia Koimisis in the Early Cycladic period. The majority of the pottery fabrics at Panaghia Koimisis were identified as Theran and the analysis demonstrates intensive contacts between the southern parts of Thera and Therasia throughout the Early and late Middle Cycladic phases. Moreover, adding support to previous studies, this research indicates a wide Cycladic pottery network, in which the site participated as a consumer. During the late Middle Cycladic period major changes in the Theran production are documented, including the disappearance of the earlier pottery recipe, which had been prevalent at Panaghia Koimisis.

This article contains epigraphically based studies which aim to bring increased order to the chronology and prosopography of Roman Sparta. It is concluded that only one occurrence of the nomen Aurelius can be assigned with any confidence to the period before the Constitutio Antoniniana. A dedication for Septimius Severus and his family is discussed. Epigraphic evidence for M. Aurelius Aristocles of Taenarum and his family is presented. An epigraphic reference to the ‘Pitanate Lochos’ recruited by Caracalla is discussed. The dating of the occasions when the god Lycurgus is attested as eponymous patronomos is discussed, when it is argued that Woodward's dating for the fourth to eleventh patronomates (c. 180–90) is some fifty to sixty years too early. The career of the champion runner P. Aelius Alcandridas is elucidated. Texts referring to the sculptor Demetrius are discussed. An account is given of priests of the imperial cult at Sparta under the Severi, fifteen priests being identified. A list of Spartan patronomoi of the third century is compiled. In an appendix a revised text of IG v. 1. 168 + 603 is proposed.

The Knives. Three complete one-edged knives, and one fragmentary, were found in the tombs. The bronze knive (I. 5) belongs to a small group in which the whole of the handle including a T-shaped pommel extension was cast in one piece with the blade, while inset panels of perishable material were secured by rivets and deep flanges in the metal. Apart from this pommel-flange it is similar to a large contemporary group of bronze knives to be found throughout the Aegean.

One-edged knives with flanged handles are at least as old as the Shaft-grave period at Mycenae. In Crete a riveted handle without flanges was preferred from Middle Minoan times, but the flanged handle appears at the end of Late Minoan II or the beginning of IIIA. The pommel-flange is rare, though found occasionally on both riveted and unriveted knives. The earliest dated example is probably that from the Palace of Mycenae found with other objects of Late Helladic II or early III date; one comes from Dendra, Chamber Tomb 7, and one unriveted from Chamber Tomb 2, dated L.H. IIIB. The Mycenae knife has not the true T-projection but only a broadening at the end of the handle which is in shape very like handles of Levantine daggers and two-edged knives found in the so-called ‘Hyksos tombs’ of Ras Shamra and at Tell el Ajjul, Tell Fara, and elsewhere in Palestine.

A fragment of an archaic temple model from the British School's early excavations at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta is published. It is suggested here that its decoration represents a timber-framed building. Support for this argument is found in the similar construction technique used for the early 7th-cent. temple of Artemis Orthia. Its contribution to the debate concerning the evolution of the developed Doric order is considered. In further discussion of the significance of votive ‘house models’, doubts are expressed about the universal applicability of recent explanations linking them with female cults explicitly associated with protection of the household.

About four miles south of the modern railway station of Diakophto in Achaia, on a high saddle between the valleys of the rivers known to Colonel Leake as the Bokhusia and River of Kalavryta, just north of the modern village of Mamousia, are the remains of a small walled ancient city. Leake supposed these ruins to be those of the ancient Achaean city of Keryneia: later the French Scientific Commission in the Morea identified them with the town of Bura: Leake accepted this view, which prevailed generally until it was refuted by Professor Ernst Meyer of Zürich in 1938. I was not at first inclined to accept all Professor Meyer's arguments; he has, however, courteously answered my objections, and a re-examination of the evidence has convinced me that he is right and that the ruins are indeed those of Keryneia.

I visited the ruins at the end of 1950 and in the foundations of a small building above the theatre discovered an antique bronze in the form of the head and neck of a goose. This I took to the National Museum in Athens, where it was cleaned and found to be of such interest that a small joint excavation by Mr. Zapheiropoulos, Ephor of Antiquities, and myself, was agreed upon.

This excavation was carried out in May 1951. Unfortunately Mr. Zapheiropoulos was unable to be present himself, but I had the benefit of the guidance of his experienced foreman, Mr. Andreas Mitropoulos.

The study of ancient Greek and Latin in Australia and New Zealand, especially at Sydney Church of England Grammar School in New South Wales, produced this century a number of leading scholars who made a major contribution to the study of Old World archaeology in Europe and Australia this century. Among them were V. G. Childe, T. J. Dunbabin, J. R. Stewart and A. D. Trendall. In developing their respective fields of expertise, all spent some time in Greece, as students, excavators, research workers and soldiers, and had formative links with the British School at Athens. Australia's debt to the Classics is reflected not only in the life-long attachment to their legacy, and to Greece, by the former Prime Minister, the Hon. E. G. Whitlam, but in the perpetuation of their influence in such Colonial and modern structures as the monument of Lysicrates in Sydney's Botanic Gardens and the National Library and new Parliament House in Canberra, and in an official poster illustrating multiculturalism in Australia. Despite their role in shaping Australia's European history, the teaching of Classics is under threat as never before, and the late Enoch Powell, at one time Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Sydney, has stigmatised the obscurantism which threatens to impoverish if not undermine Western civilisation by closing access to knowledge of our Classical past.

The temptation to probe the origins of a people who brought war and destruction with them, but whose absorption was followed by the great renaissance of Greece is infectious. Philologists have not regarded the warning of Beloch who twenty years ago wrote ‘Gewiss werden Wanderungen auf der griechischen Halbinsel in vorhistorishcher Zeit stattgefunden haben; aber wir wissen dariiber nichts, absolut gar nichts, und wer es anders sagt, der tauscht sich selbst und sein Publikum’ and now the anthropologist is emboldened to try. Much water has flowed under the bridge since 1890, and I make the plunge. I take leave to change the question from the usual formula, ‘Who were the Dorians?’ to ‘Who are the Dorians?’ The attempt is made from the point of view of physical anthropology, in the hope that it may prove a contribution; for the aid of archaeology and philology is obviously needed in the solution of such an involved question.

Whereas the 1954 tombs belonged to the House of Shields, of the two uncovered in 1955 one was within the House of Sphinxes and the other lay immediately to the west of it.

This burial does not need any lengthy description. It was found at the east end of an otherwise unfruitful trial trench dug immediately to the west of the modern road which runs along the western side of the House of Sphinxes. It consisted of the skeleton (in very poor condition) of a small child, placed on the rock. Two bronze pins lay together over the chest, and a cup was found on the rock beside the body. There was no longer any indication as to how the skeleton and the associated objects were originally protected.

Upper Macedonia is the upland country which lies at the back of Mount Bermius as regards Macedonia properly so-called, which is the Campagna between the hills and the sea at the head of the Gulf of Salonica. Beyond the hills Olympus, Bermius, and their continuation northward, lies Upper Macedonia about the valleys of the Haliakmon and Erigon and round the lakes of Ochrida, Presba and Kastoria. This was the fourth region of Macedonia according to the Roman division after the defeat of Perseus at Pydna in 168. This region according to Livy included Eordaia, Lynkestis, Pelagonia, Stymphalis (sic), Elimiotis and Atintania. The country to-day falls naturally by its geographical features into several divisions and these correspond, as far as our information goes, with the ancient districts. Going westwards from Edessa along the line of the Via Egnatia, near the lakes, of which Lake Ostrovo is the chief, the traveller first reaches some hilly country which forms the watershed between the valleys of the Erigon and Haliakmon. To the north in the valley of the Erigon is a long, narrow plain stretching from Fiorina past Monastir to just beyond Krushevo and Prilep. The northern part of this plain is itself separated from the rest by a low range of hills about the villages of Tsepik and Topoltsani.

This paper presents in detail a deposit of metallurgical debris from a small-scale casting operation at Palaikastro, E. Crete. The deposit consists of a selection of discarded metalworking tools, including tuyères (blowpipes), crucibles, and moulds, all of which are indicative of different processes involved in the production of metal objects. The moulds offer rare evidence for the local manufacture of specific object types that can be identified from the fragmentary remains. In addition to moulds for various tool types, such as double axes, there are fragments of moulds for a large decorative stand similar to the ‘rod’ tripod stands found predominantly on Cyprus. This is the first evidence for production of these stands on Crete at such an early date.

Professor Doerpfeld in the Athenische Mittheilungen, xxx. pp. 257–97, has put forward a theory regarding the relation of the later to the earlier palaces at Knossos and at Phaestos, which requires serious consideration, not only in view of Doerpfeld's high authority in such matters, but also in the light of the results of excavation, as these have been accumulating from season to season at different sites in Crete.

It will clear the ground considerably if, as a common starting-point of argument, it is agreed at the very beginning that the question at issue is primarily one of stratification, and that all understanding of sequence in development is ultimately conditioned by our apprehension of the character of the sequence in the stratification, in so far as that has been brought to light by actual excavation.

Nobody flashed a shield at the Battle of Marathon, for it is scientifically impossible: hoplite shields were curved, and you cannot reflect a flash from a curved surface. The shield can only have been waved (as Herodotus says), making it a short range signal, not from far-off traitors in Athens but traitors at Marathon, signalling the movements of their own army to the enemy. The Persians' voyage round Sounion was long and tedious, and the quickest way to Athens would be to land as soon as possible after Marathon, at Loutsa, and for the cavalry to dash for the city. The signal warned that this route was blocked, hence Plan B—Sounion.

In an oracular tablet from Dodona dating to the mid-fourth century bc, a slave named Kittos inquires whether his master, Dionysios, will set him free. A roughly contemporary entry in the Athenian phialai inscriptions records Dionysios isotelēs manumitting Kittos the metalworker. This paper suggests that the individuals in both documents may be identical. Along the way, it also takes a position on a number of questions surrounding the phialai inscriptions. These inscriptions are not really inventories, I propose, nor can they be explained in terms of lawsuits unrelated to manumission. (The presence of families and children in the inscriptions is especially important in demonstrating this point.) Instead, they represent acts of manumission effectuated through dikē apostasiou prosecutions, an Athenian practice which, I believe, dates back to the 350s. It was not until the 330s, under the financial administration of Lycurgus, that the city imposed mandatory phialai dedications upon all manumissions in court, with the phialē serving as a manumission fee paid to the treasurers of Athena.

A small group of note-books containing memoranda, itineraries, copies of inscriptions, and miscellaneous sketches by Sir William Gell was recently acquired by the British School at Athens, and it has seemed worth while to publish the following brief account of their contents, together with a rather fuller description of the two most important features which they present. These are (1) the copies which Gell made of numerous inscriptions, and (2) his own brief diary for the first part of his mission to Asia Minor on behalf of the Dilettanti Society in 1812—13.

This shell applique in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford was acquired by Evans in Crete in 1894. He was told that it came from the Mesara, but there is no evidence to link it with the Ayios Onoufrios deposit. The material is Aegean Spondylus gaederopus L., not Tridacna from the Red Sea. The plaque is probably Cretan work of the period of the Early Palaces (Middle Minoan I–II), not Early Minoan or Archaic Greek as Evans at different times believed. It seems to represent, not a negro or ‘negroid’ as often claimed, but a physical type attested by other representations of Bronze Age date in Crete and elsewhere in the Aegean area.

The iconography and composition of the Arcesilas Cup are widely acknowledged to have been modelled on weighing scenes found in Egyptian funerary art. However, less attention has been given to how the Arcesilas Painter came to experiment with a composition found in Egyptian funerary art, and why he would want to do so. This paper revises previous studies of the Arcesilas Cup's subject and its similarities to Egyptian illustrations of the weighing of the heart spell. Next, it explores how exchange and consumption in the sixth-century Mediterranean can be used to make sense of the cup's unique subject. Finally, it proposes contexts for the transmission of designs between Egyptian and Laconian artists.

The Roman ‘Agora’ of Gytheum appears to be a large compound with an interior peristyle; its width is 52 m and its length at least 61 m. Excavations have revealed the remains of the north-east corner and a portion of the west wing. The extant architectural blocks allow the reconstruction of the colonnades. Column shafts were made of local red limestone and at least some of them were crowned with lotus-and-acanthus capitals. Three different interaxial column spacings are present. A single column must have stood on each corner of the peristyle. The style of the column capital suggests a date after the year ad 100. The entablature is almost identical, in both style and dimensions, to the one found on the Captives' Facade at Corinth. The inscription on two epistyles reveals the private dedication of an exedra to theoi Sebastoi and the city. Most probably the exedra was behind the colonnaded space; the mention of theoi Sebastoi might suggest imperial cult either in the exedra alone or both in the exedra and in the entire colonnaded compound. Quite possibly, and following A. Themos' suggestion, a large part of the colonnaded compound that is conventionally termed the ‘Agora’ can be identified with the Sebasteum/Caesareum of Gytheum; this latter structure is attested in other inscriptions from the city.

The Byzantine coinage in the twelfth century was of three kinds. There were gold nomismata, with a purchasing power which must have been a good deal greater than that of a present-day five-pound note, and also nomismata of ‘pale gold’—gold alloyed with silver—of lower value; at the other extreme there were bronze coins, smaller than a modern farthing, which were the coinage of the market-place; intermediate, but still of low value, there were coins about the size of a halfpenny, normally made of copper lightly washed with silver. The silvered bronze and the gold were not flat, as are most coins, but saucer-shaped. The reason for their unusual form is not known. Numismatists describe them as scyphate, and refer to the middle denomination in the later Byzantine system of coinage as Scyphate Bronze, to distinguish it from the petty bronze coinage. Scyphate Bronze was first struck under Alexius I (1081–1118). Substantive issues were made by John II (1118–43), and such coinage became extremely plentiful under Manuel I (1143–80) and his successors Isaac II (1185–95) and Alexius III (1195–1203). After the capture of Constantinople in the course of the Fourth Crusade, the successor-states to the Byzantine Empire at Nicaea, Salonica, and in Epirus continued to issue scyphate bronze coinage, although in much smaller quantities, until after the middle of the thirteenth century.