In their preface to Vol. X of the Cambridge Ancient History the editors promise that in Vol. XI will be found a ‘survey of the several provinces during the two centuries that end with the Antonines.’ The student of Roman Cyprus cannot be advised to turn to this volume, because he will there find no mention of Cyprus whatsoever, even as a word in the index. This neglect—for such, indeed, it seems—is indicative not only of the quite literal insularity of this small and in general insignificant province, but also of a long-standing and unwarranted indifference to Cypriot epigraphy. Since the profitable visit of Waddington in 1862, few epigraphists have landed in Cyprus with any higher purpose than the enjoyment of a busman's holiday; and whereas prehistory, archaeology, sculpture, coinage and the literary sources have been the subject of specialised study, the historian of Cyprus under the Empire, when he takes up the only available collection of inscriptions for his period, that still indispensable work Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, finds there sixty-nine inscriptions only, of which several have been poorly published and some again imperfectly edited.

The small Greek island of Antikythera has a long history of human exploitation, of which one of the most interesting episodes is represented by a fortified settlement on the north coast of the island that can be plausibly identified as a centre of Hellenistic piratical activity. Hellenistic ‘Aegila’ has left both impressive standing remains and a range of portable finds that have attracted academic interest over much of the last two centuries. This paper examines the pottery assemblage from this period recovered during a recent intensive survey over the island's entire extent. We consider the spatial and typological character of this material as well as the implications it has for the Hellenistic community's wider social, economic and political connections.

The thirteenth-to-sixteenth-century (“Venetian”) defended settlement of Kephalos on the island of Paros was surveyed by the Cyclades Research Project (CY.RE.P.). This article offers an archaeological case-study of the kastro by examining and interpreting its medieval material remains (defensive walls, chapels, cisterns, domestic structures and surface potsherds). Moreover, on the basis of combined information from written sources and comparable building projects in late medieval Italy and the Latin-dominated Levant, more light can be shed on aspects of daily life in the Aegean. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first phase of Kephalos could be placed in the later thirteenth century but it was extended with the addition of an outer defensive wall in the late fourteenth century and was inhabited until the legendary besiege of the corsair Barbarossa in 1537. Domestic remains within the kastro suggest that the site must have been densely built, housing a large number of peasants in single-roomed two-storey houses. Architectural remains and ceramic finds on the highest point of the site testify to the existence of a strong Catholic/upper class element on the most prominent portion of the kastro, reserved for the Latin lords and their agricultural produce. Extensive survey (by CY.RE.P.) in the valley below Kephalos has shown that a number of contemporary satellite settlements existed and functioned around the kastro, suggesting an agriculturally intensified use of the rural landscape. Additionally, the study and interpretation of the surface ceramic finds offer a window to late medieval living standards and food preferences in the Aegean

A gold myrtle wreath was acquired by the Jean Paul Getty Museum in 1993, and returned to Greece in 2007: it is now housed in the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki (inv. no. ΜΘ 24000). While its technical features and methods of manufacture have already been discussed in previous publications, this article focuses on provenance, dating, and comparisons. On the basis of a detailed structural analysis and parallels for this wreath, the author suggests Central Macedonia as its provenance and a date towards the end of the 4th century bc. This is the eighth myrtle wreath from this region, implying that this type was made in local workshops. The concluding section of this article offers a brief account of the use of wreaths in ancient Greece.

Ένα χρυσό στεφάνι μυρτιάς, που αγοράστηκε από του Μουσείο γκεττύ το 1993, επιστράφηκε στην Ελλάδα το 2007 και συμπεριλήφθηκε στη συλλογή του Αρχαιολογικού Μουσείου Θεσσαλονίκης (ΜΘ 24000). Οι τεχνικές λεπτομέρειες και η μέθοδος κατασκευής του έχουν παρουσιαστεί σε σχετικές δημοσιεύσεις. Η παρούσα εργασία εξετάςει την προέλευση, τη χρονολόγηση και τη σύγκρισή του με άλλα παρόμοια χρυσά στεφάνια μυρτιάς. Βασισμένη στη λεπτομερή ανάλυση της δομής του αντικειμένου και στα παράλληλά του, η συγγραφέας προτείνει την Κεντρική Μακεδονία ως τόπο προέλευσής του και το χρονολογεί στα τέλη του 4ου αιώνα π.Χ. Είναι το όγδοο χρυσό στεφάνι μυρτιάς από την περιοχή αυτή υποδηλώνοντας ότι αυτός ο τύπος κατασκευαςόταν εκεί, σε τοπικά εργαστήρια. Στο τελευταίο τμήμα της εργασίας γίνεται σύντομη αναφορά στη χρήση των χρυσών στεφανιών στην αρχαία Ελλάδα.

From the opening of the British School at Athens in 1886 to the outbreak of the First World War, women were regularly admitted as Students. British women were actively engaged in research in Greece, although they were not permitted to join official School excavations until the 1911 campaign at Phylakopi on the island of Melos. This contrasts with the active field research of American women like Harriet Boyd Hawes. Most of the British women had been educated at either Girton College or Newnham College, Cambridge, where they had been influenced by Katharine Jex-Blake and Jane Harrison. For several, notably Hilda Lorimer, Gisela Richter and Eugenie Strong, their residence in Athens was to make a significant contribution to their careers and subsequent study of antiquity.

The recently reaffirmed identifications of Millawanda (= Miletos) and Apasa (= Ephesos) in the Hittite archives also confirm that interaction between Ahhiyawa and the Hittites was mainly in South-West Anatolia. Since Ahhiyawa was ‘across the sea’ from there, it is now shown to have been one of the ‘kingdoms’ of Mycenaean Greece. The Dodecanese Islands have been proposed, where a population increase may have been accompanied by immigration from the Argolid. But, even if combined with part of the Anatolian mainland opposite, the Dodecanese would not have been sufficiently important, since at least one king of Ahhiyawa was addressed as an equal by a Hittite Great King. Of the other suggested identifications, only Mycenae possessed the power and international status indicated. The Dodecanese seem marked as ‘the islands’, mentioned in the Hittite texts both as belonging to Ahhiyawa and as a haven for persons fleeing Hittite retribution.

The remains of an exceptionally well-preserved Hellenistic wine press were uncovered during a rescue excavation at Knossos in 1977. The architecture, stratigraphy and faunal remains from this campaign were published in BSA 89 (1994) by J. Carington Smith (the excavator) and S. Wall. The artefact assemblages from this excavation, however, have remained unstudied and unpublished until now. The current article presents the artefact assemblages from the wine press excavation and considers them within their urban context at Knossos. The key findings from this excavation relate to the Late Hellenistic wine press and its associated material, which enables us to consider both the ancient winemaking process at Knossos and the economic topography of the city in the decades around the Roman conquest of the island in 67 bc. In addition to the Late Hellenistic phase, material of Minoan, Early Iron Age–Early Archaic, earlier Hellenistic and Early Roman dates is also presented and discussed.

Among the hunting scenes that the Aegean iconography of the second millennium bc offers us, representations related to bird hunting seem to be absent. Newer information has emerged, however, from the restoration of the frescoes from Xeste 3 in the Late Cycladic I / Late Minoan IA settlement of Akrotiri on Thera. On the first floor of Xeste 3, a community sanctuary whose function has been connected with initiation rites, the Great Goddess of Nature (the Potnia) was depicted appearing among young crocus gatherers, possibly during a religious festival related to the regeneration of nature. Two pairs of mature women with sumptuous dress and elaborate jewellery, carrying lilies, wild roses and crocuses as offerings to the Goddess, were rendered on the walls of a corridor that led into the room where the seated Potnia is located. Among the women in the corridor is one holding a sheaf of white lilies and bearing a net pattern with small blue birds on her upper arms. The net has been viewed as a bodice with embroidered miniature swallows. However, specific details of the net pattern indicate the depiction of a real net with captured small, possibly migratory, birds, to be offered to the Potnia. The subject of trapping birds with a net perhaps refers to a ritual act that would have taken place during an autumn or spring festival, given that the trapping of migratory birds takes place during these two transitional seasons. The particular importance and symbolic value of the subject, which enriches the Aegean sacred iconography, is also suggested by the representation of a net with a captured bird on a Late Minoan IB sealing from Agia Triada, which comes from the bezel of a signet ring, apparently made of gold, as well as the rendering of what is possibly a net on the back of a Late Minoan IIIA2 clay male figurine holding a bird, found on the bench in the Shrine of the Double Axes in Knossos.

In 1992–93 excavations were conducted in central Knossos, among the Minoan houses south-west of the Palace. This article describes the unexpectedly large amount of post-Minoan occupation there, casting new light on the extent to which the Hellenic town encroached upon the allegedly deserted Palace area. One Minoan house, much ruined, proved to have been reoccupied in the tenth century BC and again in the seventh. Nearby, a well-preserved pottery kiln of the early seventh century was discovered, and also a paved road of the fifth century which apparently ran across the ruins of the Minoan houses.

The pottery and other finds are presented in fourteen stratified deposits, mainly of the Early Protogeometric, Early Orientalizing, Late Archaic, and Classical periods. These are supplemented by important unpublished pieces from Evans's soundings in the immediate neighbourhood, confirming the extensive seventh-century reoccupation of the site.

The excavation is described of a much damaged shrine building five kilometres east-north-east of Sparta, in use from the 7th to the 4th centuries B.C., and again in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D.

Tile stamps suggest it was dedicated to Zeus Messapeus. Finds include many handmade terracotta statuettes, chiefly of grotesque ithyphallic human figures.

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the painted fragments discovered by Arthur Evans and his team in the Throne Room at Knossos in 1900. We have tried to integrate systematically the extant archival data stored in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the archaeological remains at Herakleion in an attempt to retrace the history of discovery of the paintings. In our view, the iconography of this programme places its execution at the onset of Late Minoan (LM) II. We see the inclusion of both ‘traditional’ (Neopalatial) and ‘innovative’ (Final Palatial) elements in the composition as suggestive of an attempt on behalf of the artist(s) and the commissioner(s) to blend artistic traditions in the creation of a new, yet still recognisable, image of power. We assess the implications stemming from this suggestion and interpret the decorative programme of the Throne Room at Knossos as part and expression of the emergence of the wanax ideology.

The possibility of establishing the sequence and chronological development of Mycenaean pottery by excavation on a well-stratified site is remote. Remains of the Mycenaean period are, generally, found either on rocky outcrops or in the eroded upper levels of mounds which have been inhabited for many centuries, and there is, thus, little scope for true stratigraphic excavation. The very considerable quantity of Mycenaean pottery which has been discovered in the Mediterranean area and the studies of it which have been published in the last twenty-five years have produced the impression that Mycenaean pottery is ‘well known’. Indeed, such pottery is, on the whole, easily recognized but there is often great difficulty in dating it. Pottery from settlements has largely been neglected, on the grounds of its fragmentary condition, in favour of better-preserved examples from tombs. The result is that, in his volume dealing with chronology, Furumark was able to use, for the L.H. III period, only ten groups of pottery from domestic contexts. Moreover, if the student of today wishes to compare new material with these groups, he will find that the evidence from Mycenae (four of the ten groups) was almost completely lost during the war and that of the rest only the pottery from Athens and from Zygouries is available.

This article argues that, by concentrating on a reading of the depictions of deities on the Athenian document reliefs as symbolic representations of states rather than as divinities, previous scholarly approaches to them have failed to explore the role they ascribe to the gods in collective decision-making and the exercise of public authority. This article resituates the interpretation of these monuments in the context of other monuments depicting the gods and recent approaches to them, and the other ways in which public inscriptions, both at Athens and elsewhere, make reference to divine actors, through their erection in sacred spaces and the use of the theoi heading. It then examines the range of possible readings of the relationship between divine agency and political decision-making which these monuments privilege and argues that they reflect a conventional understanding that, in general, Athenian decision-making was underpinned by the gods.

A fragmentary inscription found at Thebes casts new light on the abortive invasion of Athens in 506 by Kleomenes, the Boiotians, and the Chalkidians. On the one hand, it provides valuable confirmation, soon after the event, of the general drift of Herodotos' account of events; on the other, even in its incomplete state, it adds one important detail lacking in Herodotos. And, of course, it tells the story from the Boiotian point of view.

The excavation took place in the winter of the year 2001–2 in the property of Evanghelia Madhis at Thebes following her application for the construction of a new house. The plot is situated in the suburb of Pyri, in the north-west periphery of Thebes, about 800 m from the city centre of Thebes, and just beyond the Athens–Thessaloniki railway line (FIG. 1). In it was unearthed a well-built tomb-like cist, made of three rows of large conglomerate stone blocks in regular masonry; similar blocks form its pavement. No traces of covering stones or other relevant materials have so far been discovered. However, since the contents of the cist—including objects such as the bronze inscribed sheets found at the bottom—were probably thrown there when it was abandoned, it may never have been properly covered: no trace of a superstructure or roofing system is preserved on the upper surface of the walls of the cist.

Of the bronzes found during the recent excavations, one, the naked woman, No. 6, is an important contribution to the history of Spartan art, while many of the others present points of special interest. Two statuettes, Nos. 4 and 6, are almost certainly local work; two others, Nos. 1 and 9, are probably so. The protomai, Nos. 24–28, have every claim to be Spartan products; so too have many of the minor objects. Two figures appear to be imported from the North-East Peloponnese, Nos. 2 and 3. In the following account, a complete description is given of the more important unpublished bronzes, and a short supplementary description is included of some of the bronzes published in Vol. XXVI of this Annual. A number of small and apparently insignificant finds are also mentioned, since it is desirable to have a complete record of the bronzes associated with a given site.

People who walk in mountains grow accustomed to finding their movements facilitated from time to time by what the mountaineering books call ‘corridors’ or ‘high-level routes,’ in places where one might have expected nothing but large stones. There is a famous one from Zermatt to Arolla. There is a little one between Stye Head and Sea Fell, running from Skew Ghyll to the Ling Mell col above Hollow Stones. There is another—improved but not created by man—along the north face of Pillar Mountain. Of the same nature, and equally unexpected at first, are the ‘rakes’ and ledges which sometimes run right across a rock face, and assist, as one might say, the tactics of the mountaineer, just as the major high-level routes assist him in his strategy. They may even assist the faint-hearted to get off a face altogether. Or, of course, such a ledge may be upside down, and then it is not so good.

During excavations in Euboea from 1906 to 1911, the late G. Papavasileiou opened twenty Late Helladic tombs near Khalkis, the contents of which are in the museum at Khalkis. He published the finds from two of these, Trypa I and II, in his Περὶ τῶν ἐν Εὐβοία̣ ἀρχαίων τάφων (1910), 21 ff., but the contents of the remaining eighteen were not published owing to the excavator's death in 1917. At the suggestion of Professor A. J. B. Wace I applied for, and in 1939 was given, permission to photograph and publish them. To Professor Wace, who has very kindly read the catalogue and made valuable corrections in dating some of the pots, I owe my grateful thanks for inspiration and encouragement, and I thank the Greek Ministry of Education (particularly Professor Marinatos) for assistance in giving me access to the material. I have not been able to check the catalogue at Khalkis.

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 fifth campaign on the Palace Site of Knossos had a twofold objective:—(I) The continued exploration of the Palace itself, with the special object of ascertaining its original elements, on which the Cists and Repositories found in 1903 had already thrown so much light; (2) the further investigation of dependencies lying beyond what may be called the inner enceinte. In addition to this, the discovery of an extensive Minoan Cemetery and of a Royal Tomb went greatly to swell the volume of the year's excavation.