The Byzantine churches of Cilicia have attracted considerable attention during the last 80 years. Often scholars have focused on the urban centres of Cilicia Pedias, the coastal settlements of Cilicia Trachea, and the monasteries near the important roads. However, the Taurus mountains, those lofty barriers which surround the fertile plain, have been ignored by most modern investigators. In the late antique world Greek communities found protection and sustenance in the isolated Highlands. While not as wealthy or numerous as their more urbane cousins to the south, these Cilician Greeks also have left behind monuments of their worship.

In the summer of 1979 I was fortunate to locate and survey in the Highlands two Byzantine churches which hitherto had not been published. The study of these buildings was part of a more general field survey of classical and medieval sites. Since no excavations were undertaken all descriptions and surveys are based on surface remains. The purpose of this paper is to describe the location, masonry and plan of each church and to offer rudimentary conclusions based on a comparison with the known Cilician churches.

During the 2008 field season at the Byzantine city of Amorium an unusual and unexpected surface find was recorded. It was a terracotta spacer pin of the type that was frequently used in Roman provincial baths. As such it provides the first evidence for the existence of a Roman-period bathhouse at Amorium, which may be regarded as a predecessor to the Byzantine bathhouse that has been excavated there.

A Neolithic structure was rebuilt three times at Çukuriçi Höyük, on the central Anatolian Aegean coast, despite its unfavourable location on unsettled fill. We draw upon this seemingly incongruous case to make inference about the siting of buildings in Neolithic times. Through detailed cross-comparison with other sequences of vertically superimposed buildings in Anatolia and the Aegean region, we retrace the contours of a Neolithic practice aimed at maintaining occupation in one place. Over time, building continuity transformed into a strategy by some households to claim authority over a place and appropriate it for their own benefit. With regard to the location of Neolithic buildings, we conclude that choices about location dominated over practical considerations. Once a commitment to place was made, there was no turning back, even when this meant living in an unstable house that needed to be rebuilt repeatedly.

As of today there are several variant versions of the myth relating to the death of Dumuzi, the more important of which are: “Inanna's Descent to the Nether World”, “Dumuzi's Dream”, “Dumuzi and the galla.” The text here edited, inscribed on a hitherto unpublished tablet, BM 100046, consists of an account of Dumuzi's death that parallels to some extent the hitherto known versions, but includes a number of rather unusual themes and intriguing motifs not found in any of them. It is a pleasure and a privilege to dedicate this study to Oliver Gurney with whom I collaborated in preparing a volume of Sumerian literary texts in the Ashmolean Museum (OECT V), and who moreover published in the year 1962 an exemplary summary of what was then known about Dumuzi and his tragic death.

A funerary stele of a Pannonian auxiliary soldier recovered in 1996 at Gordion (Turkey) provided the first concrete evidence of Roman military activity at the site. The Latin epitaph on the monument revealed the presence of a unit (cohors VII Breucorum c.R. equitata), previously unattested in central Turkey, within the rural environs of northern Galatia. Little is currently known about the garrisons and movements of auxiliary forces in that region, and the monument's discovery permits a fresh examination of military deployment within Rome's comparatively lightly-garrisoned provinces of Asia Minor. New archaeological fieldwork in the Roman settlement at Gordion has provided a firm context for the stele, and recently published epigraphical finds relating to the soldier's unit and its deployment strongly link the monument's presence to activities surrounding Trajan's Parthian War (AD 114–117).

Gritille is the modern name for a mound lying on the right bank of the Euphrates River in southeast Turkey. Four years of excavation by a team led by Professor Richard S. Ellis of Bryn Mawr College concentrated on uncovering two main occupation levels bracketing the site's long sequence, the Neolithic and the Medieval. This article will focus on the last three seasons of excavation on top of the mound.

The mound of Gritille lies 10 km. upstream from Samsat (Greek Samosata, Arabic Sumaisāṭ), a major halting point on the medieval road from North Syria through Urfa (Greek Edessa, Arabic ar-Ruhā) to Malatya (Greek Melitene) and central eastern Anatolia. It was at Samsat that the crossing of the Euphrates was attempted. Samsat was also a stop for East–West traffic from Diyarbakır (Āmid) to Birecik (Bīra) and beyond, but the road through Nisibin (Nusaybin) and Harran (or Urfa) to Birecik seems to have been heavily travelled in the late Middle Islamic period (Fig. 1).

Accessed in late 1964 into Burdur Museum not long after the latter had been formally constituted, inv. no. 292 is the only inscribed monument there which bears the word paramone. This rectangular marble bomos with a phiale top, corner acroteria and a decorative moulding around its outer edge, carries relief decoration and text on all four faces. The monument warrants a little more discussion than can be allowed in the catalogue which we are preparing of the inscriptions in that Museum. No provenance is stated in the Museum Inventory register; we must settle on a general origin within the province of Pisidia.

Four-wheeled wagons, which can be considered as one of the major breakthroughs of man's technological evolution and range over a considerable period of time, seem to appear as pictographic signs on inscribed clay tablets from Uruk in southern Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium B.C. These simple vehicles which are depicted with a roofed superstructure were probably drawn by a pair of bovids the existence of which is attested in the ancient Near East both by literary sources and osteologically. The evidence for four-wheeled wagons, this time without a roof, becomes extensive in the following millennium as represented on the “Standard of Ur”, the “Vulture Stele”, specimens of vase painting, sealing and seals, terracotta and metal wagon models and actual wagon remains. In the beginning of the third millennium B.C. they are depicted in military contexts, hence the name “battle cars”, whereas there is no evidence for a similar use towards the end of the period and following millennia. It seems that they were relegated to cult use in the later third millennium B.C. and continued to the early second millennium B.C.

The interesting bronze “belt” or decorated strip in Urartian style which was discovered at Gushchi near Lake Urmia in 1905, and which has twice been illustrated in Anatolian Studies, is generally known only from the photograph of one small fragment which was first published in an obscure Armenian journal in 1912 and has since been successively reproduced by B. A. Kuftin in 1944, G. M. A. Hanfmann in 1956, and R. D. Barnett in 1963. At least four other fragments, however, of the same object are known to exist. One is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and three have recently been received in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (Plate I, a). These still do not make up the whole object, but they enable its original dimensions to be calculated with some assurance and the character of its ornament to be described exactly.

The ancient settlement of Sos Höyük, situated east of Erzurum, is providing a significant stratigraphic sequence of human occupation from the Late Chalcolithic to the Medieval period. This sequence includes the transition from the end of the Bronze Age into the first centuries of the Iron Age, a period which is surrounded by difficult but intriguing historical questions. At the mound of Sos Höyük evidence for this transition is starting to emerge from a relatively small operation on the northern slope, midway down the mound, in trenches M15 and L16.

The stratigraphic record at Sos Höyük together with a large range of radiocarbon readings taken from samples collected over four seasons of excavation indicate that the site was occupied throughout the late fourth/third millennium BC and intermittently in the second millennium. The earliest centuries of the second millennium BC are best defined by storage pits, wattle and daub dwellings and burials that conform generally to a tradition initially documented by Kuftin in his excavations of the Trialeti kurgan burials near Tbilisi, Georgia (Kuftin 1941; Miron, Orthmann 1995: 79–94).

Alfred Biliotti, British vice-consul at Trebizond, spent nine days at Satala in 1874. He is well known as an enquiring and meticulous observer. The account of his visit, in a consular paper in the British Museum, remains by far the best description of the legionary fortress, and holds several items of particular interest.

Biliotti was able to record at leisure structural remains in an altogether better state of preservation than is true today. His 18 ft walls, with traces of ashlar facing, are now reduced to rubble cores visible, except at the north-east and south-east angles, only in eroded sections (Figs. 1, 2). Of the square projecting towers there is now barely a trace. The supposed look-out towers reported on the surrounding mountain tops are known from no other source.

His are the only excavations on record in Armenia Minor, and at any point on the limes itself between Trapezus and the rescue work north of the Keban dam.

His account is a valuable source for social conditions in the villages during the late Ottoman period. The way of life at Satala depended on techniques that can have changed little since Roman times, and survived virtually unaltered until the introduction of tractors in the later 1960s.

The following article has to be conceived as one of my responses to a long standing and enigmatic question-mark which I have been carrying incessantly in mind since my first acquaintance with cuneiform writing and archaeology: Are there interactive implications between archaeological record and textual context in Hittite Anatolia at all? One might promptly and spontaneously expect that as a principle there must have been close relations between both sorts of data, since, first of all, they are mental and material products of the same people. Why are, then, the results gained from comparisons of archaeological and philological material disappearingly feeble considering that Hittitology is in a very lucky position in being supplied abundantly by both sorts of material? The temporary results gained from the comparative studies by other scholars as well as by myself were often disappointingly meagre. This is one of the reasons why I have frequently pointed out in a pessimistic way inconsistencies between archaeological objects and information supplied by the written sources in Hittite culture.

1993 was the second season of the five-year survey which it is planned will record five castles from the area of the Büyük and Küçük Menderes in western Turkey. Work at the site of Yılanlı kalesi was carried out between 20th March and 28th April. The team members were Dr. Mark Whittow (Director), Hugh Barnes (Surveyor), Katrina Batchelor, Kevin Chesters, Michael Harrington and Penelope Tunbridge. We are extremely grateful to the Department of Antiquities for granting us a permit to carry out this survey, to the Director and staff of the museum at Ödemiş. for their friendly help and encouragement, and to our Department representative, Ahmet Bayram Üner from the Türk İslam Eserleri Müzesi in Bursa, whose contribution to the success of this project can hardly be overestimated. Our warmest thanks too to the muhtar and villagers of Yılanlı köyü, above all to Nihat and Güller Girgin and family, for whose generosity and kindness we are extremely indebted.

In the course of the late Alan Hall's survey of Oinoanda, a Graeco-Roman city of northern Lycia, between 1974 and 1983, further survey work at the site led by Stephen Mitchell in 1994 and excavations in 1997 led by the Director of Fethiye Museum, İbrahim Malkoç, and Martin Ferguson Smith, many architectural, historical and epigraphical questions have been answered or at least clarified. Other questions, however, await further fieldwork, to be carried out by others, at what is a very beautiful and forested, but rubble-strewn, waterless, and relatively inaccessible, site. In the meantime, progress can be made with the unpublished records and notes of previous campaigns. This article presents five inscribed statue bases, or their remnants, in context from the upper agora of Oinoanda.

The focus of this article is the recently published, near-duplicate ARSUZ inscriptions carved on two stelae found near İskenderun in southeastern Turkey and dating to the later tenth century BC. Particular attention is given to the historical section of these inscriptions, and its reference to a land called Hiyawa (Assyrian Que) in eastern Cilicia, previously attested in only one other Iron Age inscription, the Luwian-Phoenician bilingual found at Çineköy near Adana. The article discusses what new information can be deduced about Hiyawa, including its relationship with the land of Adana(wa) in eastern Cilicia, the implications to be drawn from the findspot of the stelae and the much-debated question of whether the references to Hiyawa reflect Greek settlement in southeastern Anatolia during the Early Iron Age. Fresh attention is also given to the two Akkadian texts from the archives of Late Bronze Age Ugarit which refer to a group called the Hiyawa-men, who were located at that time (late 13th to early 12th century) in Lukka in southwestern Anatolia. The controversial identification of this group with Ahhiyawans/Mycenaean Greeks is re-examined within the broader context of a comprehensive reconsideration of the Ahhiyawa-Hiyawa equation and the role played by ‘Hiyawans’ and the land of Hiyawa in the affairs of the eastern Mediterranean world from the end of the Bronze Age through the succeeding Iron Age.

Die einstmals kreisrunde, flache Bronzescheibe, angeblich aus Ostanatolien, die hier vorgestellt wird (Pl. XXX–XXXI), befand sich 1981 für kurze Zeit im Labor der Prähistorischen Staatssammlung, München. Die Form des Bleches, die bisher bekannten Beschlagblechen nicht genau entspricht, die historische Darstellung auf dem umlaufenden Fries und das Mittelemblem verdienen eine genauere Behandlung.

Die Scheibe: Die durchschnittlich auf eine Dicke von ungefähr 1/2 mm. ausgehämmerte Bronzescheibe wird durch 4 konzentrische getriebene Wülste in einen mittleren Kreis, drei Zonen und einen Rand aufgeteilt (Fig. 1, Pl. XXXa). Im Übrigen ist sie ganz flach, und das dürfte auch ihrem antiken Zustand entsprechen: sie muß allerdings einmal brutal quer gefaltet gewesen sein, wovon eine Reihe von Rissen und Knicken herrühren, die von links unten nach rechts oben verlaufen (Pl. XXXa); an den Enden dieser Faltung ist auch der Rand am weitesten ausgerissen. Die nachträgliche Begradigung dieser Partie ist wohl modern. Links oben und rechts unten jedoch ist der offenbar ursprünglache flache Zustand bewahrt.

The three inscriptions published here were all shown to me on 7th August, 1969, in the course of a brief visit to the village of Ayasören, near Kula, Turkey. To my knowledge, all three are previously unpublished.

1. A grave-stele now built into the pavement of the courtyard behind the house of Mustafa Koyuncu, on the right of the road that leads out of the village in the direction opposite that of the road from Kula (Plate VIa).

Dimensions: height, 1·22 m.; width at bottom, 0·47 m.; letters, 0·025 m.; thickness undeterminable.

Since the stone is now in a position where it is constantly being walked on, the letters are faint, and it was necessary to rub them with charcoal and then splash water on the surface in order to get a photograph.

The pediment of the stele bears a circular decoration in the centre, and a leaf-like decoration in each lower corner.

The site of Tell esh Sheikh was excavated in 1947 and 1948 as part of the British project at Alalakh-Tell Atchana in the Amuq plain. It is located two miles west of Tell Tayinat, which adjoins Alalakh, with the mound of Tabara al Akrad one and a half miles east. Other sites on the eastern edge of the plain include Çatal Höyük and Judeidah. Woolley discusses Tell esh Sheikh in the reports of excavations at Alalakh. The seals are described most fully by Buchanan, based on information and sketches supplied to him by the excavators. The present study reflects research done in the Antakya Museum and references to its inventory books. As stated by Buchanan, the seals are distributed over seven levels at the site and include a number of gables made of bone. Further information regarding archaeological context is lacking, according to David French, who is reviewing documentation and finds for the forthcoming publication of the Tell esh Sheikh excavation.

An investigation of seals and sealings at such sites as Norşuntepe and Değirmentepe in eastern Anatolia, and Tepe Gawra in northern Mesopotamia, has provided close parallels for materials, shapes, motifs and styles found in the Tell esh Sheikh seal corpus. Such associations in part confirm results of pottery analysis but also raise questions about the correlation of pottery and seal chronology, and about relations between sites on the Cilician plain and regions closer to the resource-rich areas in the northeast. A review of findings follows below.