From several passages in Herodotus it is possible to piece together a general description of the Caspian Sea which, apart from its claims to accuracy, is at least comprehensive when judged by the standards of Herodotean geography. The Caspian, says the historian, is a sea by itself without connexion with other seas. Its length is fifteen days' journey in a rowing boat, and its breadth at the broadest part is eight days' journey. Its western shores are bounded by the Caucasus and its eastern shores by vast deserts. Its southern shores form the boundary of Asia in the North.

The sequence of construction of the Propylaia to the Acropolis of Athens is reassessed in the light of Pontus Hellstrom's suggestion that the two unbuilt east halls, and the original plan for the S.W. hall were intended to be dining halls like the Pinakotheke. It is argued that the objections of the various priests are unlikely to account for changes in plan; that the east halls were abandoned before work started on the S.W. wing; and that the cause of the change was financial, the need to economize in the face of the growing certainty of war with Sparta.

Returning to Smyrna from a journey up the Aeolic coast in July 1960, I stopped at the village of Buruncuk, which lies at the foot of an ancient site on the north edge of the Hermus Plain. The site is the excavated one commonly identified as Larisa Phrikonis or Larisa Aegyptia.

It is not, however, certain that the identification is correct. In view of its position on the Hermus Plain and the sudden access of prosperity that the excavations show to have occurred there after the middle of the sixth century, we can confidently recognize the site as one of the two towns of the Hermus Plain that were given by Cyrus the Great to the soldiers of the Egyptian guard after the defeat of Croesus in front of Sardis; and we know that Larisa was one of the two towns. But the possibility remains that the Buruncuk site is the other of the two towns (i.e. Cyllene) and that Larisa itself was the more impressive site on the hill above Yanik Köy four miles further east. We shall return to this problem; but for the present purpose we may note that Larisa and Neon Teichos, which is commonly identified with the Yanik Köy site, lay close together in the vicinity of the Hermus Plain.

The excavations conducted to the north of and around the House with the Idols during the last two decades have brought to light groups of Hellenistic pottery from domestic contexts which will be presented in the following outline. The purpose of this article is principally to discuss the fine wares and the lamps as a distinct typological group, adding to our scant present-day knowledge of Hellenistic pottery in the Peloponnese outside Corinth. A discussion of the over-all archaeological context of the pottery as well as of the cooking-, coarse-, and pithos wares is to follow in a different context planned for a future publication.

The principal feature of the Hellenistic layer covering this area comprises two strata of construction within the identified dwelling units. These houses lay to either side of what appears to have been a street or alley, running up the slope south of both the Ramp House and the South House, carrying on in an approximately north west – south easterly direction.

One might give as sub-title ‘Attic Marble: Science and Common Sense’. The names by which Greek marbles are usually known have been gravely questioned in recent years. In a very important article in the Annual for 1968, Mr. Colin Renfrew and Mr. J. Springer Peacey emphasized the need for more scientific research and further development of new methods before one could safely attach the common labels—‘Pentelic’, ‘Hymettan,’ ‘Parian,’ ‘Naxian,’ or ‘Island’. ‘Most of the attributions hitherto made’, they said, ‘and hence the various observations based on them, are not well founded’; and later, ‘If “Hymettan” merely means “finegrained grey”, and “Naxian” simply “coarse-grained white” there seems little point in using the geographic terms. Such a usage denies the hope that the origin of the various marble used for Greek sculpture may one day be better understood.’

In 1995, the authors carried out a geophysical survey (resistivity) within the lower part of the ancient city. This trial survey successfully identified buildings and streets (including the junction of the Via Egnatia with the ‘diagonal road’). It was confirmed that the city had been planned according to two different street-grids, one respecting the Via Egnatia and the other aligned upon the ‘diagonal road’. Included is a new plan of Philippi, taking into account the evidence provided by the latest excavations.

In the past the inaccessability of the Lasithi district of Crete has made a thorough botanical survey difficult. Its flora is still imperfectly known, but as far as can be ascertained at present, it is definitely not as rich in rare plants as several other Cretan districts. Even so, it contains well over a dozen of the island's most spectacular endemics.

The Lasithi plain itself is too well cultivated to allow many plants to grow, but the annual Crepis rubra, with flowers like clear pink Dandelions, is a weed on many of the banks. During late summer the grey spiny hummocks of Cichorium spinosum are none too lavishly dotted with their soft sky-blue flowers of typical Chicory shape, and in the walls at the western end of the plain Aristolochia sempervirens is firmly established. The leaves are shaped like arrow-heads, of a dark and glossy green, and among the long twining stems hang down the flowers. Their bent tubular shape is weirdly fantastic and their colour equally so, being dark brownish maroon with a startling golden blotch on the lip.

The scope and a summary of the results of the 1962–3 excavations at Palaikastro and their relation to the earlier work of 1902–6 were set out in Part I (BSA lx (1965) 249–52). There is no call to repeat those findings here, nor has further study made it necessary to make any significant revisions.

In this article we publish the Late Minoan IB and reoccupation pottery from Block N (excavation report in PK VI. 252) and from other tests, along with an account of work undertaken in the main area of the town at Palaikastro (Roussolakkos).

As before, the excavation report was written by L. H. Sackett, while M. R. Popham contributed the sections on the L.M. pottery. We are grateful to P. M. Warren for notes on the stone objects and to V. E. G. Kenna for a note on one sealstone.

The material still awaiting final study and publication consists principally of Early and Middle Minoan pottery from Kastri, tests in Block Χ, Block Γ, and Square H3.

Approach.: The subject of this talk is in one sense a rather personal one. I am venturing to say something about my own approach to History. I had the good fortune to be born just not too late to come in for the old-fashioned ‘Early Modern Western’ education in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures; the first grown-up job that I did was to teach Greek and Roman history for the School of Literae Humaniores at Oxford; and, in afterwards exploring other provinces of history, I have always found my way into them through a Greek gate. Greek history has been, for me, the key to world history.

Professor Wace's brilliant services to archaeology have been diffused over so wide a field that it is not difficult to cite some notable work of his in connexion with almost anything that one may oneself offer to his Festschrift. As I wish to write of a famous fifth-century bronze statue, I may gratefully remember his illuminating article on the Chatsworth head, printed in JHS LVIII (1938), 90–95.

Among the Mahommedan religious antiquities of Asia Minor the tomb-sanctuaries held to represent the resting-places of Arabs killed during the forays of the viii–ix centuries form a well-marked and extremely interesting group. Their authenticity is on general grounds more than doubtful. The campaigns of the Arabs led to no permanent occupation: the lands they had conquered for the moment were restored to Christendom or fell to alien races. Only in the borderlands, where in times of peace Christian and Moslem might meet on equal terms, can we expect a true tradition regarding Arab graves or a continuous veneration of them to have persisted.

Of these borderland Moslem cults supposed to date back to the Arab period we can point to two examples, the tomb of the ‘sister of Mahommed’ at Tarsus and the tomb of Umm Haram in Cyprus.

The former is mentioned by Willibrand von Oldenburg (1210) as still a place of Moslem pilgrimage under the Christian kings of Armenia. It was situated outside the church of S. (Beatus) Peter and S. Sophia in the middle of the town.

While the development of the Mycenaean goblet and kylix has been studied in some detail, comparatively little work has been done on their Cretan equivalents. We are still, in the main, dependent on the remarks of Evans in Palace of Minos, who was mainly concerned with the L.M. II examples; on brief comparisons made by Furumark, who was basically considering Mycenaean pottery; and on some general observations by Mackeprang. Though in part this is due to neglect of L.M. III pottery as a whole, a main reason is no doubt the scarcity of intact decorated kylikes in Crete. Leaving aside the L.M. III goblet, only thirteen have been illustrated in publications and a similar number of other unpublished decorated kylikes are on display in the various museums of Crete. A list of the published vases and of others is given at the end of this article. Even allowing for unpublished kylikes not on display, this small number is unlikely to be an accident of excavation; it is evident that the decorated kylix was rare in Crete in L.M. III, though plain examples are much more common, particularly in central Crete. In the east of the Island, however, both kinds appear on present evidence to be exceptional.

To some additional notes on this series I have appended the accounts of Chios given in the three unpublished Isolarii, as samples of their style and scope. Chios is chosen as being the native island of Lupaz-zolo, the most important of the three authors.

This inscription consists of two decrees, one of which gives a certain Sthorys the Athenian citizenship, the other of which provides for a simple amendment. Despite fairly numerous editions, a number of difficulties of detail remain which seem sufficient to warrant a further discussion. In the first place, the most recent editors, Wilhelm and Meritt, while agreeing on the general substance of the text, have a number of discrepancies in their readings, though neither has provided a detailed commentary on the readings adopted. In addition, the full implications of fragment (b) have not been taken into account hitherto. Secondly, Sthorys, the recipient, is a very shadowy figure, and the precise circumstances in which he received Athenian citizenship are not altogether clear. Thirdly, the formula employed for the grant of citizenship in this decree is somewhat unusual compared with that found in other such decrees of the fifth and early fourth centuries. The purpose of this article therefore is, firstly, to provide a new text with a full critical commentary, and also to consider the physical details of the stele; secondly, to consider fully the contents of the two decrees, and in particular the status of Sthorys and the possible reasons for his honours; and finally, to discuss the formula for the grant of citizenship in this decree and in the other preserved examples of the fifth and early fourth centuries.

The occurrence of formulae in Attic inscriptions is, of course, universally recognized, although it has perhaps become clear that an over-rigid approach towards them, particularly in fifth- and early fourth-century examples, is unwise. The usefulness of such formulae for restoration also depends to a certain extent on the volume and the spread of dated, or approximately dated, material available. In the case of citizenship grants the situation is particularly good since there not only exists a reasonably large and widespread set of more or less closely dated documents but the decrees themselves contain a peculiar feature which renders them especially susceptible to restoration. Indeed, there are some grounds for regarding decrees that record grants of citizenship as forming a special category among honorific decrees. The reason is that the full formula for recording the grant always consists of more than one distinct clause or element. There are always at least two clauses involved, each of which (apart from the simple statement of the grant) refers to a specific and necessary point of procedure; and each of these elements of the full formula has its own individual formula in the sense of having a distinct method of expression. Thus, in citizenship decrees, even when the form of expression within the individual elements is open to variation, the general, or over-all, formula for the grant remains the same in a given period, in that the individual elements themselves remain. For instance, in the earliest grants the total granting formula embraced two separate elements, namely the statement of the grant, and the enrolment of the recipient into a deme and tribe and phratry. Both of these elements could be (and were) expressed in slightly different ways, but the two points themselves are always present in the record. So the over-all granting formula is the same.

This paper deals with a bronze sword found during repair work on a road close to the Hittite capital of Hattusas in central Anatolia. It carries an Akkadian inscription stating that it was taken as booty by the Hittite king Tuthaliyas II during his campaign in the Assuwa country of western Asia Minor, c.1430 BC. The content of the inscription may be evidence of Ahhiyawan-Mycenaean Greek warfare in western Asia Minor in the Late Bronze Age, and/or of a historical background for the Trojan war.

During the excavations at Mycenae in 1953, a Protogeometric cist burial was discovered in the House of Shields, sunk into the floor of its west room. This burial, numbered Tomb PG 601, was published, with other burials, in BSA XLIX 258 ff. In the summer of 1954 Professor Wace uncovered three further burials in the House of Shields. These, at his most kind invitation, I publish here.

General situation (Fig. 1). Whereas tomb PG 601 was found at the southern end of the west room of the House of Shields, these three, here numbered 602, 603, and 604, appeared in the north-western corner of this same room. Only a few feet separate the one from the others, as will be clear from the plan, and 602 and 603 seem to have been placed under the shelter of the west wall. The area had been to a certain extent disturbed, but whether there may have been further burials between 601 and this group of three I cannot tell. None was found in the excavation.