About A.D. 400 the historian Olympiodorus, surveying the contemporary state of culture with a perhaps conventional sigh of nostalgia for a vanished silver age, wrote that “Of the other liberal arts, such as arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, there are a few remains left to our time. But of music even its fame is not known to us. We have books on musical theory but we do not understand them”. Much the same had been said by Aristoxenus some seven centuries previously, which suggests that as far as the ancient world, at least, is concerned, any attempt at reconstructing the music of Greece can never be more than hypothetical and subjective. This does not mean that valuable information cannot be sifted from ancient texts and archaeological evidence, and the number of studies cited over a 25-year period by Winnington-Ingram testifies to the continuing interest of the subject despite its intrinsic limitations.

In the spring of 1955 the Water Company, extending its drainage system to include Erechtheion Street, a road in the neighbourhood south of the Acropolis running south from the street of Dionysius the Areopagite, uncovered part of the wall and a gate of the ancient city. The Ephoria of Acropolis Antiquities under its then director, Mr. J. Miliades, undertook the excavation of these remains. With the aid of his epimelete, Dr. G. Dontas, the present director of the Acropolis, he cleared the wall and the gate down to bedrock, and extended his investigation to uncover as many building remains and other finds as possible, under a fair amount of pressure from the Water Company, who were in a hurry to begin their own work. The excavation, which took place from March until June 1955, has added considerably to our knowledge of the topography of the area during the classical period; at the same time it uncovered a Dark Age cemetery.

The Hellenistic period in the Aegean is one notoriously devoid of firmly established chronological markers with more than local significance and which might be used to divide the cultural material into smaller groupings. This is especially true for pottery. The Aegean basin was parcelled out among numerous ceramic provinces which, though all were obviously heirs to the traditions established in the Classical period, yet managed to interpret any new ideas in their own way and at their own speed. These apparently newly emerged styles were in fact of hoary antiquity. They represent the resurgence of local mores and traditions in pottery manufacture whose existence in the Classical and Archaic periods had been well-nigh overlooked by the excessive concentration on the study of the products of Corinth and Athens. Their re-emergence was occasioned by two factors consequent on the establishment of the Hellenistic kingdoms. The first was the collapse of Attic pottery production as a result of a series of disastrous wars and defeats in the later fourth and early third centuries B.C. The second was the very real prosperity enjoyed by the provincial centres in the newly Hellenised world.

The four authors of this paper have worked in close consultation throughout the project, and present a joint result rather than so many separately initialled sections. Catling has most responsibility for the archaeological matter, Jones for the analytical work, Cherry and Jones for the interpretation of the results of the analyses and Killen for the epigraphic comment.

It must be noted that a single series of numbers, 1–108, is used throughout this paper to distinguish the test samples. The significance of these numbers is made clear in the Catalogue and Concordances.

Nowadays new country tracks are constantly being opened all over the Greek countryside, as demanded by the general mechanization of agricultural work. This is at once the hope and despair of the archaeologist in charge of the area as it often reveals and sometimes destroys antiquities otherwise completely buried and unsuspected.

A new country track of this kind following the foot of the northern slope of the Anemospiliara Hill just to the west of the loftier Petsophas at Palaikastro ran very near the top of the side of a curious round construction with burnt edges, a small section of which was barely visible below a thick bush of prinos (Plate 1). The area, known as Στῶν Μανϱοκουκουλήδων οἱ πεζοῦλες, is about 400 metres from the sea and 300 metres SE of the excavated parts of the Minoan town of Palaikastro at Roussolakkos. From it there is a splendid view over the whole site and the small bay of Palaikastro, with the trapezoidal Kastri Hill dominating the horizon in the background (map Fig. 1).

Studies previously conducted by Warren into this group of material, which was found in some of the cists within Magazine XIII of the Palace at Knossos, and considered to belong to a gypsum worker's atelier dating to LM II-IIIa, were concentrated especially on establishing the position of the workshop in the broader perspective of the Minoan stone vase-making industry. I now examine in greater detail one area of study that Warren commented upon — the technical procedures of construction that were employed (with particular reference to the vases), with the intention of building up more accurate information about the tool kits than has hitherto been available.

The pottery illustrated below was found by the author in Thebes Museum boxed together with the material from Dramesi-Hyria, with that from Scimatari and with a large amount of post-Mycenaean material. It was brought from Scimatari Museum to Thebes in the early part of the decade for restoration. A search for its provenance has been fruitless, although it is probable that the MH III-LH I material belongs to the Dramesi-Hyria deposit: Blegen illustrates an askos of this period and a second Middle Helladic vase as well as the early Mycenaean ones and mentions the presence of other vases not illustrated. These vases are published here together with the earlier material in order to add to our knowledge of the Early and Middle Helladic periods in Boeotia.

These differing conclusions, regarding early Euboean trade at Al Mina, from leading Students of the School may seem to contain the seeds of another internecine, Lelantine War. So, since the author has a homely interest in the Plain, and counts the two contestants among his friends, he thought he might intervene, though with no pretence to the same expert knowledge of the period in question and with a strong vested interest in Euboean enterprise.

The point at issue is the source of a distinctive group of sherds from Al Mina, probably the earliest Greek pottery found on that site; they belong to rather shallow skyphoi, or cups, decorated on each side with two groups of compass-drawn semicircles pendent from the lip and usually overlapping.

This article originated from a suggestion by Dr. Chadwick, that it would be useful to those studying the Linear B archives from Knossos to have a list of sites which archaeologists believe to have been occupied at the time of the destruction of the Palace in whose ruins the tablets were found.

An opportunity to follow up this suggestion came when the author was invited to contribute to a volume of studies in honour of Professor Doro Levi. Unfortunately the study was not finished in time, but it remains, as intended, a small offering to a senior Italian colleague.

At the request of the Ephorate, a suspected tomb on Gypsadhes was investigated in September 1979 by the author. Deep ploughing had broken through what appeared to be the roof of a chamber tomb. While other cemeteries are known on Gypsadhes hill, no tomb had so far been recorded in this particular location.

The field in question is located immediately south of Knossos village: a slight depression, or gully, on the north slope, it lies some 150m west of the dirt track which gives access to the hill, Fig. 1. In the higher, NE corner of this field, cross-hatched on the sketch plan at Fig. 2, the kouskouras had been cut into by the plough, and it was here that the LM III tomb (for such it turned out to be) was located.

The pottery of the LH IIIB period has frequently been treated as if it were a homogeneous product, uniform throughout the Mycenaean area; and LH IIIB has been envisaged, by several scholars, as the period above all of the Mycenaean Koine Furumark, however, who considered the pottery of LH IIIA2 rather than LH IIIB to be “the Koine style par preference”, emphasised the degree of local development during LH IIIB in certain parts of the Mycenaean world, particularly in Cyprus and in Rhodes. Nevertheless, he regarded LH IIIB as “the period of the greatest Mycenaean expansion”, with the Argolid as the “political and cultural centre of the Aegean world”, and on the Mainland, where LH IIIB settlement material was scarce, particularly in areas other than the Argolid, a blanket definition of the pottery of this period was drawn mainly from tombs, over half of which were Argive. While recognising that some of his LH IIIB groups were stylistically later than others, Furumark left the period chronologically undivided.

The intention of this paper is to set out the evidence for the ties between the family of Herodes Atticus, the Athenian consul and sophist, and the city of Sparta. Its kernel is the re-edition in Part Two of a fragmentary inscription from Sparta, which contains — it will be argued — evidence for the marriage of a previously unknown sister of Herodes to a Spartan aristocrat. The context of this match was a long-standing association between Sparta and the family stretching back at least to the Flavian period, all the other evidence for which is first examined in Part One.

1 A Note on an Inscription from Chorsiai: Hestiatoria in Boeotia

The inscription is SEG XXIV 361. Originally published by N. Platon and M. Feyel in BCH LXII (1938) 149–66, the occasion for its appearance in SEG was the detailed study b J. Taillardat and P. Roesch, Rev. Phil. (IIIe Sér) XL 1966 70–87.

Archaeological research into the prehistory of Central Macedonia started at the end of the last century with the explorations of Makridis, Schmidt, Träger, Wace and others, who reported on the numerous mound settlements and the surface material to be found on these, or undertook minor excavations. Extensive excavation began fortuitously with the entrenchments of the French and English expeditionary forces who arrived in 1916 to open a new front against the Austrians and Bulgarians and ‘dug in’ in a wide arc from the Vardar (modern Axios) to the Struma (modern Strymon) to the north of Thessaloniki. Enlightened officers, both French and English, encouraged the recovery of antiquities wherever possible, as well as undertaking the topographical study of many of the mounds. The finds were collected together into a temporary museum in the White Tower, and were later reported by Picard, Rey, Gardiner and Casson at the end of the war.

John Pendlebury excavated a number of ancient sites in the upland Plain of Lasithi in central Crete (Fig. 1) during the years 1936 – 1938. The prehistoric sites which he excavated were published in this annual before his death in World War II. This article describes the results of his excavations at three Iron Age settlements and their cemeteries in Lasithi.

The three sites – Agios Georgios Papoura, Donadhes, and Kolonna – are located along the northern edge of the Lasithi plain (Fig. 2). The finds from each excavation can be summarized as follows: I. Agios Georgios Papoura: Protogeometric to Archaic pottery from the settlement, and a nearby tomb of the Geometric period; II. Donadhes: a sixth century B.C. pottery deposit from an incompletely preserved building; III. Kolonna: two buildings, the first Archaic in date, and the second a weaving and dyeing establishment of the third century B.C., and a nearby tomb of the Archaic and Hellenistic periods.