The three marble statue bases found in February 1922, incorporated as integral parts of the wall of Athens, are unique records of Attic art. While their supreme importance was recognised from the moment of their discovery, their exact contribution to our knowledge of Attic art is a matter upon which a variety of opinions has been expressed.

M. Philadelpheus, who as Ephor of antiquities of Attica was responsible for their custody at the time of discovery, was the first to publish them. He describes each briefly. No. I. he dates to the end of the sixth century B.C. No. II. he leaves undated, and No. III. he assigns either to the Peisistratid period or to the period of the Republic before 480. He makes no attempt to deal with the works in detail or to analyse their artistic significance.

M. Oikonomos has published a brief account of II. b, in which he suggests an interpretation of the so-called ‘hockey’ game. He disregards the problems of style and date.

Dr. della Seta of the Italian School at Athens is the only authority at present to discuss the artistic value and significance of Bases I. and II. and to attempt to place them chronologically in the Attic series. His exhaustive and attractive articles deserve the closest attention.

The sculptures recently discovered by the Italian excavators at Cyrene were described and discussed by Signor Bagnani at a general meeting of the Hellenic Society on 9th November, 1920. It is hoped that Signor Bagnani's paper, together with full illustrations of all the sculptures referred to, will appear in the next number of this Journal. Meanwhile our readers will probably be glad to have a reproduction of the Aphrodite, which is the finest of them, but is not yet so well-known or so accessible as it should be on its merits.

Most of the statues found at Cyrene decorated a kind of hall, which served as a gallery of sculpture. They are by no means homogeneous, though most of them clearly belong to the Hellenistic age. There is, therefore, little external evidence to guide us to the period or school to which any of them belongs; and we are left mainly to internal evidence, derived from a study of the statue itself.

By the kindness of the owner, Mr. Arthur Bernard Cook, an inscribed electrum coin of the well-known ‘lion’ type is depicted in Fig. 1; its inscription, which exists only in part on the examples in other cabinets, appears to be complete. In the list below, the Keeper of the Department of Coins in the British Museum describes the specimens known in various sizes—Mr. Cook's being No. 5—and shows that the series has been attributed either to Lydia or to an Ionian city. The inscription seems to have been originally the same on all these specimens; it was, however, omitted from the collection of texts in Lydian script (Sardis, VI. ii. p. vii, note 1), because the uncertainty of the reading on the coins then available made its Lydian character doubtful and precluded the transcription of a trustworthy copy. Had Mr. Cook's coin been known to me in 1924, I should have included it in that small corpus as ‘No. 52.’

To students of Frankish Greece the church at Karditza in Boeotia is one of the most interesting in the country, because it contains an inscription referring to an important Frankish personage, Antoine le Flamenc, and dating from the fatal year 1311, which witnessed the overthrow of the Frankish Duchy of Athens in the swamps of the Boeotian Kephissós. Buchon had twice published this inscription; but, as I was anxious to know in what condition it was and to have an exact facsimile of it, I asked Mr. D. Steel, the manager of the Lake Copaïs Company, to have a fresh copy taken.

During the excavations of Messrs. Hogarth Grenfell and Hunt for the Egypt Exploration Fund in the winter of 1895–6 on the site of Karanis (Kom Ushim) in the Fayum, a considerable number of clay-sealings were found, mainly in the cellars of the Roman houses. These were recently put in my hands for investigation and offer some interesting material.

The sealings have evidently come from various kinds of articles: in many instances the clay is too much broken for any determination of the shape which it had taken to be possible; but among the better preserved pieces are examples from the mouths of bottles, some of which have been squeezed down into the neck like a cork, others placed over a linen covering, sometimes tied down with cord: others are from the flat sides of wooden boxes, often showing the marks of cord: others again from parcels of irregular shape, in some cases seemingly wrapped in papyrus. The common points of all are that they consist of lumps of Nile-mud, and that they have been impressed, while the clay was damp, with signets, which were presumably those of the merchants who forwarded the goods upon which the sealings were placed.

Mr. W. R. Paton, who is very well acquainted with the Gulf of Cos, has been good enough to send me some impressions and copies which he recently made of inscriptions at Keramo, the site of the ancient Ceramus. So few are the documents hitherto published from this town, that I readily consented to edit these copies for the Journal, the more so because I had been led to study the history of Caria somewhat minutely in connexion with another town of this region, Iasos. It happens also that one of the very few instances where Ceramus is named, even in inscriptions, is in a decree of Ephesus, discovered by Mr. Wood and now in the British Museum, which I have recently prepared for the press. We shall have occasion to refer to it presently.

Before proceeding to examine the inscriptions, I am glad to transcribe an account of the neighbourhood of Ceramus which I begged Mr. Paton to draw up, knowing well how interesting such particulars are to less-travelled students of Greek antiquities.

Perhaps an apology is due to the readers of the Journal of Hellenic Studies for venturing to call their attention to so fragmentary a vase as the one depicted in the accompanying illustrations, Figs. 1, 2; the excuse must be that the design offers certain points of interest which make one regret its mutilated state.

All that are preserved are the stem and part of the interior design, cm. 5·5 × 4·8, of a r.-f. kylix which was purchased at Orvieto and purports to have been found there. The clay is fine and well worked, the black varnish of the stem of a brilliant lustre. Of the exterior design there remains only a small section of the ring indicating the ground, and one long, slender foot.

It is due to the efficient scholarship and generous kindness of Professor Henri Seyrig that I am able to publish the texts of three new enquiries from Dodona. In 1929 he bought three lead tablets in Athens, which were sold to him as coming from that site. They were at that time still rolled up in the form in which most of them have been found. This fact itself can be regarded as a strong confirmation that they were genuinely derived from Dodona. Professor Seyrig proceeded to unroll the strips and fortunately copied carefully the texts which he found within. He then put them aside, and when some years later he looked at them again, the lead had completely disintegrated. Thus the original tablets are gone, but Professor Seyrig's copies survive, and he has kindly put them at my disposal for publication.

These enquiries are generally quite typical of those already found, but also have some individual features of interest. They are all from private enquirers asking Zeus for guidance on personal subjects. The lead tablets showed no signs of previous use. They were not palimpsests, as are some other extant examples. Also as preserved at the time of copying, they showed no marks on the reverse of the tablets, such as were used to distinguish one enquiry from another after it had been rolled up. But such marks may have been on the back of the first line or two, which in each of the three instances appear to be missing.