The Toumba and Tables of Vardaróftsa lie at the south end of a ridge that separates Lake Amátovo and the Vardár river (Fig. 1), some 35 kilometres N.W. of Salonika (Fig. 2). To south and east the ridge falls gently to the lower levels; more abruptly on the west to the river's edge. Northward, the ridge extends to where the Toumba of Várdino crowns its other extremity, looking down on the flats round Karasouli.

Between the Toumba of Vardaróftsa and the river, where now stand the village church and a few houses, rises the fine spring which no doubt attracted the original settlers to the site and assured its continuous occupation. A further reason for the selection of the site was perhaps the fact that the river is easily fordable at this point, and travellers passing from the Struma valley into Western Macedonia would make the crossing here. In Homeric times, when the Vardár formed the frontier of Priam's kingdom, the place must have had strategic importance, and in later times, when the successive settlements had raised the artificial mass high above the surrounding level, it must have offered a valuable strong-point from which the whole country-side could be commanded.

A small group of note-books containing memoranda, itineraries, copies of inscriptions, and miscellaneous sketches by Sir William Gell was recently acquired by the British School at Athens, and it has seemed worth while to publish the following brief account of their contents, together with a rather fuller description of the two most important features which they present. These are (1) the copies which Gell made of numerous inscriptions, and (2) his own brief diary for the first part of his mission to Asia Minor on behalf of the Dilettanti Society in 1812—13.

A Permit was granted for the School to carry out a trial excavation at Haliartos in Boeotia with the object of establishing the plan of the ancient walls of the city and testing the future possibilities of the site.

Digging was begun on March 30th on the west wall of the Acropolis—Mr. Woodward being present to direct operations for the first two days. Five men were employed at first, but after the opening week the number was raised to six.

For about a fortnight the workmen were employed in determining the lines of the walls of the Acropolis. It was found impossible in the limited time available for the excavation to include the outer town walls in the investigation. For the second fortnight the men were chiefly engaged in excavating a sanctuary and adjacent buildings which were discovered within the Acropolis. Work was continued until April 28th.

The following article, sent by Finlay to The Times on October 3, 1867, and corrected in proof and returned by him on September 5, 1868, was never published, but is preserved, like the similarly unpublished article on the same subject for Blackwood's Magazine, in both the corrected proof and a copy of the original manuscript in the Finlay Library. The longest of all his newspaper articles, it contains his view of the ‘great’ Cretan insurrection of 1866–69; and, together with his subsequent articles on the same subject published in The Times of December 18 and 25, 1868, January 8, 16 and 22, and February 5, 1869, may be regarded as a supplementary chapter of his History. As a contribution to the history of this insurrection, it may be compared with Ballot's Histoire de l'Insurrection Crétoise, Hilary Skinner's Roughing it in Crete in 1867, and The Cretan Insurrection of 1866–7–8 by Stillman, then U.S. Consul in Crete, and subsequently correspondent of The Times in Athens and Rome—all three eye-witnesses—and with such later works as Wagner's Der kretische Aufstand, 1866–67, and ῾Η διπλωματικὴ ῾Ιστιρία τη̑ς Κρητικη̑ς ᾿Επαναστάσεως του̑ 1866, by Papantonakes, published in 1926. Finlay paid two short visits to the island during the insurrection, one described in The Times of June 1, 1867, the other in an unpublished letter to that journal, dated June 11, 1868. I have added a few explanatory footnotes.

The Assyrian Room of the British Museum contains several cases of objects (almost all unpublished) that throw light on the Hellenism of Mesopotamia: the bronzes are chiefly statuettes of Olympian deities, perhaps imported from Egypt or elsewhere, but the stone sculptures and terracottas, however Greek in style, are as often of Asiatic as Greek subjects. Of those that are purely Hellenic in subject a terracotta statue of a male child and a marble head (both in Wall-case 20) are the most striking, though aesthetically among the least successful members of the collection.

The principal series of metopes from Thermon has been familiar for so long that further discussion of them may seem unnecessary. I hope, however, that the following pages are justified by the collective result of the small observations which they contain, if not by any single one of these. There is little of a general nature to be said after Koch's excellent article in Ath. Mitt., 1914.

I. Chelidon and Aedon. (Antike Denkmäler, ii., Pl. L, 1 (Soteriades). Photographs of details, Ath. Mitt., 1914, Pls. XIII, XIV (Koch)).

In the first place, a word as to the technique, the surprising elaborateness of which calls for more close attention than it has hitherto received. An interesting point is that the contours of the female flesh are drawn in bright red, the same as is used for the inscription, and for many details of dress. This use of red outlines for female flesh occurs, though not commonly, on Corinthian vases—on hydriae in the Louvre (E. 695) and in Dresden, where the faces and bodies of the sirens under the side handles are outlined in this way. It is found also in Attic vase painting—in two Sophilos fragments and in the fragment of similar style, from the Acropolis, with Pandrosos and Poseidon. The Corinthianising character of these has long been recognised, and the usage seems to be a subtlety which vase painters occasionally borrowed from the free painting of the time. On the other hand, male flesh in all the metopes is consistently outlined with black; the reason for the distinction is not easy to see, but it is possible that the artist was in search of equivalents for rendering the colours proper to the sexes—brown outlined with black for the male being used to balance white outlined with red for the female. In any case, the distinction was carefully maintained and was evidently felt to be significant.

During the Archaic period in Greece, many small centres were at work, producing bronze statuettes for local use. The existence of these centres has only been partially recognised and their history has still to be written. By the second quarter of the fifth century, most of them had been absorbed by the large industries, such as Argos, Corinth and Sikyon; just so, at a somewhat earlier date, the manufacture of vases in nearly all other Greek towns gave way before the vases of Athens.

The bronzes of Arcadia belong to one of the few local groups that has not been overlooked. Sections of it have come under the notice of more than one scholar, though it has never been surveyed completely.

It is one of the most vital, since it began to show its independent character as early as the seventh century, and it survived the competition of such overpowering neighbours as Argos and Corinth throughout the fifth. In the sixth century it was very productive and very individual in style. It is, therefore, easy to recognise. All these points claim our interest. But the bronzes themselves, peasants carrying their sheep and calves, dressed in high hats and embroidered cloaks, gods and goddesses in the likeness of Arcadian shepherds and Arcadian girls,—these not only interest but also delight us by their naïve charm and their fitness to the Arcadian uplands from which they come.

The statuette represented in the accompanying photograph is about 37·6 cm. in height. The left leg is broken off above the knee, and supported on a prop which forms part of the base. The right leg is only roughly chiselled at the back, which suggests that the front side alone was visible in the position in which the statuette was originally placed. The nature of the object on the right shoulder is uncertain. The upper portion is like a kind of boss, and the lower front portion resembles an animal's claw. It has been suggested that it represents a pedum; but the angle at which the missing portion (if there has been a fracture, which is not certain) would project puts some difficulty in the way of this hypothesis. If, however, the object on the shoulder was part of an animal's skin extended across the breast, all traces of that have disappeared; though in a spot over the right ribs the marble has been shaved away to a flat surface, against which some object may have rested. There are three similar shaved spots in other parts of the body: behind each shoulder-blade and on the nates, and these may well indicate the places at which the statuette touched a wall. The position of the shaved spots behind the shoulder-blades does not suggest that they were the starting-points of wings. A small portion of lead piping is inserted under the left arm in the back of the mask—apparently a Comic one—carried in the left hand. The marble is of a rough crystalline character, probably Parian or Naxian. In the absence of the head and of all certain attributes it is difficult to say whether the statuette represents an Eros or a Satyr.

As an illustration from a good manuscript in the Round Notation I have chosen a Canon of which I can present a reproduction from my own photographs. It is in the First Authentic Mode, and belongs to the Sunday before Christmas (fourth in Advent). This Canon does not find a place in the service-books now in use, but the words are in the printed Hirmologus. As poetry they are neither better nor worse than the ordinary run of Byzantine Canons.

Our text is from the Hirmologus, Cryptoferratensis E. γ. II, date about 1280. Our facsimiles contain another Hirmus coming before the Advent Canon, namely, the last ode of the Canon, ω̨̕δὴν ἐπινίκιον ἄ̣σωμεν πάντεσ,2 likewise in the First Authentic Mode.

Translations. Canon ᾠδὴν ἐπινίϰιον last ode: ‘Let us all magnify the light-bringing Cloud, by whom the Lord of all, like rain from heaven upon a fleece of wool, came down; and for our sake was made flesh and became man, though He was from everlasting—let us magnify her, the Holy Mother of our God.’

A Short account of the campaign of 1926 at Sparta has already appeared in the Annual Report of the British School for the Session 1925–26, and consequently need not be repeated here. Work started on April 7th and lasted until June 5th, the Director being in charge throughout, except for a brief visit to Athens to attend the opening ceremony of the Gennadios Library on April 23rd. He had as helpers Mrs. Woodward, Mr. P. De Jong and Mr. G. A. D. Tait, who were present for the whole campaign; and, for shorter periods, Mr. H. Box, who stayed from the start to April 18th, and returned for the last three weeks of the work, Mr. W. L. Cuttle, Miss K. Chrimes, of the British School at Rome, and Miss E. Tankard, who again came to draw our finds of small objects.

The Hellenic Government was ably represented by Dr. Th. Karachalios, Ephor of Laconia and Messenia, and the Archaeological Section of the Ministry of Religion and Education again kindly allowed us to employ as foreman Georgios Alexopoulos, Phylax at Mycenae, who performed his duties with his customary zeal and competence. Our total number of workmen averaged nearly fifty, though for a time we had as many as sixty, and we were fortunate in losing very little time through bad weather.

The main results of the work in 1926 may be summarised as follows: (1) The completion of the uncovering of the stage-buildings, and the location of the street running east and west behind them. (2) The excavation of the area east of the stage, down to its marble pavement, by uncovering a wide strip, extending from the east wall of the stage to the foot of the external staircase described in my last report (B.S.A. xxvi. p. 132). (3) The clearance of a strip along the west Parodos as far as the east face of the projecting bastion, which we assumed to have carried a staircase similar to that in front of the east retaining-wall; and the partial clearance of the outer south-west angle of the western retaining-wall. As we shall see, the data obtained here now prove that there cannot have been such an external stair on the west.

Minor pieces of work included the examination at several points of the wall surrounding the back of the cavea, and trials in the cavea for the purpose of obtaining more exact details as to the construction of the diazoma. The latter were unavailing, as both our pits shewed that, as a result of later disturbance, even the foundations of the diazoma were much destroyed.

The campaign of 1926 was rewarded by no very important discoveries in the department of epigraphy, but interesting documents of many different periods came to light. The completion of the task of excavating the East Parodos brought to light several more complete blocks which had fallen from the inscribed portion of the wall, and more than a dozen small fragments, some of which, as will be seen, prove to join blocks or fragments found previously. We found, moreover, that the wall of the bastion carrying the outer staircase bore four inscriptions in situ, of which the longest (F 3) is also for its contents the most valuable of all the inscriptions from the wall. At the south-west corner of the bastion we also found in situ a rough columnar statue-base bearing an elegiac epigram, inscribed over the remains of an earlier text, also metrical, but almost entirely erased (No. 35). Two decrees of Hellenistic date, from each of which substantial portions have survived, an incomplete archaic dedication by an athletic victor (No. 37) and two statue-bases of Imperial date (Nos. 33, 34) are the most interesting of the miscellaneous finds. A few small additions to our—by now considerable—number of inscribed blocks from cornices and architraves will be published later, in conjunction with a study of the architectural marbles as a whole, for which further work on the site is still required.