Thanks to the cuneiform tablets discovered at Boghaz-Keui, the capital of the Hittite empire, the thick darkness which hung over the geography of eastern Asia Minor in the pre-classical age is at last being dispelled. And therewith several questions relating to the culture and history of prehistoric Greece are likely to be cleared up.

At Kara Eyuk, also called Kul Tepè, ‘the Burnt Mound,’ eighteen kilometres N.E. of Kaisariyeh and near the village of Manjé-su, many hundreds of tablets have been found written in a West-Semitic dialect, differing but little from the vernacular of Assyria as distinct from Babylonia, and belonging to the age of the Babylonian Third Dynasty of Ur (2400–2200 B.C.). The name of the city was Kanis or Ganis, and it was a Babylonian colony, defended by the Assyrian soldiers of the Babylonian empire, but chiefly occupied by Babylonian and more especially Assyrian merchants, who worked the mines of silver, copper and lead in the Taurus and exported the metal to the civilised world. The great Babylonian firms had their ‘agents’ there; good roads had been made throughout the whole region, in connexion with the trade-route from Babylonia past Nineveh to Cappadocia, and traversed by postmen whose letters were in the form of clay tablets. I may remark incidentally that one of the places from which the copper came was Khalki, perhaps meaning ‘Wheat’-city (Contenau: Trente Tablettes cappadociennes, xvi. 12, 131), which probably gives us the origin of the Greek Χαλκός.

Fire-festivals are widespread throughout the world. They occur in Europe to the present day. Bonfires are kindled at certain times of the year, especially in Lent and on St. John's Day. Sometimes the fire is kindled on a hill or a mountain-top, sometimes in the plain or in the village; often a figure with varying names is burnt, and in some countries living beasts were once burnt in the flames of the pyre.

The fire-festivals of ancient Greece have not attracted much attention among scholars. The custom is not very common, it varies considerably in details and has been appropriated by different deities in different localities, so that the identity of the rite has been obscured. The best known cases are from Central Greece. In the cult of Artemis Laphria at Patrae, formerly at Calydon, living beasts—birds, boars, stags, wolves, bears, and their young—were thrown into the flames of a great pyre. In the cult of the same goddess at Hyampolis in Phocis human images and other paraphernalia were laid on the pyre. On the top of Mount Cithaeron a pyre was built with great care, a wooden image, called Hera, was brought thither in grand procession from the town of Plataeae, and sometimes other images from other Boeotian towns were added. On the spot each town offered an ox to Zeus and a cow to Hera; these were filled with incense, and together with the images were burnt on the pyre. Private people also made their offerings. It seems that a similar festival at Tithorea in Phocis was transferred to Isis.

This head was purchased for the Ashmolean Museum in 1920. It had belonged to the late Lord Downe, who bought it, probably at Rome, about 1800. It remained in his possession at Cowick Hall in Yorkshire until his death, when his widow removed it to her house in London. Since that, it has been in the hands of members of the family.

Only the nose is restored, but the face has been somewhat worked over, as is evident from its smoothness in comparison with the hair. Just in front of the left ear there is a trace of a curl in relief, which has been almost obliterated; and as there is a curl in the corresponding place on the Bologna head, to be presently cited, this would seem to show some rubbing down. The eyes also seem to have had some of their expression eliminated by over-working. On the other hand, there are several places on the face and ears where the surface has been only slightly abraded, and the grain of the marble shows clearly. It appears to be Pentelic, with small crystals showing here and there.

I trust I may be allowed to answer briefly the long criticism which Professor Fr. Studniczka has devoted, in the first part of this volume, to my essay ‘Poet or Lawgiver.’ The views expressed in that criticism are not new to me. As soon as my paper appeared, I sent a copy of it to Dr. Studniczka; he answered me by a long letter giving his reasons for dissenting from my theory. Indeed—to use a phrase of his own—my learned contradictor felt so ‘confident’ in the strength of his arguments, that he proposed I should make use of them to write myself, in this Journal, a recantation of my essay—a liberal offer which I was unable to accept, not out of any personal feeling, but simply because a careful study of Dr. Studniczka's case has utterly failed to shake my well-founded conviction.

At the beginning of his paper, Dr. Studniczka remarks that, of all the arguments brought forward by me, the only one which might have decided the question ‘turns out to be a worthless relic from the dead stock of E. Q. Visconti's Greek Iconography.’ This is not stating the case fairly. I never pretended to upset the traditional theory by any sensational revelation of unknown material. I simply contended—and contend—that the existing documents had been wrongly interpreted, and some of them badly published; therefore, to facilitate a more correct interpretation, I collected them once more and laid them before the eyes of the reader, in accurate reproductions; as, for instance, the Florence herm of Solon, hitherto only known to archaeologists by the untrustworthy print in Visconti.

The Ashmolean has acquired in 1922 a very pleasing draped portrait of a woman. As the circumstances of its acquisition were somewhat unusual, and as they have been stated not very accurately in the Times and other papers, I will briefly mention them. The figure belonged to the collection of Mr. Vincent Robinson, F.S.A., of Beaminster, Dorset. At his death in 1909 his collection was dispersed. The present figure found no admirers, and was bought for almost nothing by Mr. Albert Hann. It was set up in a yard and soon lapsed into a deplorable condition. It was rescued by an architect, Mr. Arnold Mitchell, F.R.I.B.A., who set it up in his garden at Lyme Regis; but was good enough to cede it to me on very moderate terms. I engaged Mr. A. Rost the sculptor to take it to pieces, to remove the iron clamps with which it was fastened together, and to substitute brass. He added in plaster the upper part of the head and the nose. It was carefully cleaned, after which it presented quite another aspect; and I had much pleasure in presenting it to the Ashmolean, where it has found many admirers. It has already been figured, from the same photographs, in The Times of September 13th, 1922, and in the Architectural Review.

Among a number of cuneiform tablets recently presented to the Ashmolean Museum by Mr. H. Weld-Blundell is an interesting seal (Fig. 1). It is an egg-shaped lump of bitumen with a slit through the centre, in which can be seen carbonised remains of the tag; stamped on it are the impressions of two different seals: a small stamp showing a winged sphinx confronted by a star, repeated eleven times, and a very finely drawn head, facing to the right, laureate, which Prof. P. Gardner states to be the head of Apollo. He compares with it the head of Apollo on the coins of Magnesia, Myrina, etc., after 190 B.C. (see B. V. Head, British Museum Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Ionia, Pl. XIX. No. 3). A similar seal is shown by L. Speleers (No. 205 on Pl. IV. of his Notice sur les Inscriptions de l'Asie Antérieure des Musées Royaux du Cinquantenaire à Bruxelles, Wetteren), who wrongly calls the figure there depicted Hermes; it is, according to Prof. Gardner, Apollo, holding in his right hand an arrow and leaning his elbow on a sacred tripod, precisely similar to that depicted on the reverse of certain coins of Seleucus II.

In the last volume of this Journal (pp. 50–69) Monsieur Théodore Reinach tried to prove that the Lateran statue, named Sophocles by nearly all competent writers ever since its discovery, in reality represents Solon, being most probably a copy of the lawgiver's Salaminian statue as described by Aeschines (pp. 59, 62). But of all the arguments brought forward the only one that might decide the question turns out to be a worthless relic from the dead stock of E. Q. Visconti's Greek Iconography. It is a replica of the head of the Lateran statue in the Uffizi put upon the herm-shaft with the inscription Σόλων ὁ νομοθέτης. Both are genuine, indeed, but do not belong together, as has been shown by Dütschke in his catalogue of 1878, and plainly confirmed by Th. Reinach (p. 65), whose illustration I repeat as Fig. 2. Every archaeologist trained in the criticism of ancient marbles will fail to understand why the latter writer ‘really sees no other explanation of the present combination’ than somebody's knowledge, drawn ‘from other sources, that this was really the traditional head of Solon.’ How often in the long period of careless restorations ‘pepererunt desideria non traditos voltus,’ just by means of such arbitrary combination? A grave error of this kind, into which the world was talked for more than half a century by the same Visconti, was his Aristotle portrait: the seated Spada statue inscribed (most probably) Άρίστι[ππο]ς and restored with the head of a beardless Roman (Heibig, Führer II., No. 1819). Of herms so enriched let me mention the four inscribed shafts of Aristophanes, Heraclitus, Isocrates and Carneades, found headless near Tivoli, but published in 1569 by Achilles Statius with antique heads, which a year later Fulvius Ursinus, evidently with good reason, declared not to belong, the Carneades head, e.g., having since been proved to represent Antisthenes (Ch. Hülsen, ‘Hermeninschriften,’ in Röm. Mitt., xvi. (1901), p. 157 sq., Nos. 7, 13, 19, 20). The Aristophanes shaft is still preserved, in the Uffizi, and now bears a different head, no more belonging to it than the other.

Although the coinage of Alexander the Great has of late years been intensively studied, and an immense advance made, almost entirely by the efforts of Mr. E. T. Newell, in its classification and dating, little attention has been paid to one detail which seems to me worthy of more careful consideration. This is the decoration of the bowl of the helmet of Athena on the gold coinage (Fig. 1). Müller (Alex, le Grand, p. 3) says merely that the bowl is most usually adorned with a serpent, sometimes with a running gryphon, rarely with a sphinx, and sometimes with nothing at all. He makes no attempt to explain these emblems, regarding them doubtless as purely decorative. There is no doubt that from quite early times such creatures had been used for purely ornamental purposes to support the crests of helmets. Between using them actually to bear the crest and as decoration in relief on the bowl there is no significant difference. If, therefore, no plausible explanation of the meaning of these emblems on the coinage of Alexander is forthcoming it is not unreasonable to suppose that they are purely decorative; but that position should not be assumed until the possibility of their having a meaning has been thoroughly explored.

Of the many resting-places assigned, by patriotic fancy, we must regretfully admit, rather than by well-authenticated traditions, to the last Greek emperor of Constantinople, none is more picturesque or more appropriate than the Golden Gate, through which, when the years are fulfilled, the victorious army of the Greeks is to enter the city and take possession once more of their ancient heritage. More than this, as Professor Polites has remarked, relatively ancient traditions of the saviour-king, who is to rise from the sleep of death at this historical moment, speak of him as dwelling ἐν τῇ πρώτῃ ἄκρᾳ τῆς Βυζαντίδος which may well enough be interpreted of the Golden Gate, standing as it does at the south-west corner of the triangular city.

Despite this appropriateness, we note in the traditions a certain discrepancy as to one essential point—the identity of the sleeper at the Golden Gate. He is either the emperor Constantine Palaiologos, or his predecessor John Palaiologos, or—S. John the Evangelist! All these traditions are historically almost equally incredible. But the intrusion of S. John, who, according to mediaeval traditions, sleeps without tasting of death in his tomb at Ephesus, is at least intelligible in this setting. The figure of John Palaiologos, on the other hand, seems to be no more than a bridge effecting the transition between the deathless saint, John, and the deathless emperor, Palaiologos, of popular tradition. This hypothetical development would be explicable if we could find such a combination as the existence at the Golden Gate of a body marvellously preserved, and therefore reputed that of a saint, which was ignorantly identified first for obvious reasons with S. John, and later swept into the long cycle of local legends concerning the sleeping saviour-king. It seems possible that some, though not all, of the missing links can be supplied.

It is by no means uncommon to find in Turkish, as in other Mahommedan lands, two or even more tombs attributed to the same person. The development of the supernumerary tomb or tombs is susceptible of several explanations, which are worth setting forth both for their intrinsic interest and as contributing to the knowledge of similar phenomena in other religions.

Duplicated tombs of perfectly historical persons are not unknown. Murad I., for instance, has authentic tombs at Brousa, his capital, and at Kossovo, where he fell. Tradition, which is probably in this case true, says that the latter contains his heart and bowels and the former his embalmed body. The grave of Suleiman Pasha, son of Orkhan, who died and was buried at Bulair, is claimed also by Yenishehr in Bithynia. The explanation here may be the same as in the case of Murad I.'s two graves, or it may be that Suleiman established a pious foundation at Yenishehr with a turbe intended to enshrine his remains. Similarly, the official grave of Osman, the founder of the dynasty, is at Brusa, though Sugut, his father's seat, lays claim to the honour.

In 1903 the Russian Archaeological Commission purchased a hydria from a dealer at Olbia which is now in the collection of ancient vases in the Hermitage (Fig. 1). Being considered by some authorities a forgery, the vase was not published in the Report of the Commission. I can assert that there is no doubt as to the authenticity of the vase. Apart from small injuries there are no important parts broken off or restored. The shape, but for some slight variations, is that of a typical late archaic hydria; sharp divisions are avoided, the shoulder being connected with the body by a soft curve and the same profile used for the foot. The ring above the foot is quite flat and not separated from the foot. On the lip of the vase there are two sharp projecting tongues instead of the “rotelle” of the archaic type (Fig. 2).

The handles are round and curved slightly upwards. The varnish is very bad and dull, being laid on very thin, so that the surface of the clay shows through. There are spots where the fire has turned the black varnish red. The clay is of a dull yellow colour, badly cleansed, with holes in the polished surface, evidently in consequence of small stones and pieces of glimmer which have broken away. The surface of the clay, in the panel reserved for the design, is of a reddish colour. The greater part of the foot, the stripes under the horizontal handles, the inner parts of all three handles and the outer part of the lip are left unvarnished. Judging from the quality of the clay and the special character of the varnish, the vase appears to be Etruscan work.

The great number of replicas of the youthful Athena known as the Rospigliosi type proves that the original was a famous statue. The bad state of preservation as well as variations in the different copies have made it difficult to date the original; the lack of good reproductions has also caused misunderstandings and has led astray the scholars who have dealt with the type. I think it necessary, therefore, to publish here a Hermitage fragment of very good workmanship, which is untouched and unrestored by any modern master. I shall not here undertake to explain the strange attributes—stars on the aegis, sea-monster in the Rospigliosi statue; the present purpose is merely to fix the date of the original.

The fragment reproduced here for the first time in fairly good photographs (Plates VII., VIII.) was found in 1823 in the so-called Vigna del Collegio Inglese on the Palatine at Rome, and formed part of the Museo Campana until 1861. The Emperor Alexander II bought a part of this collection for the Hermitage; among these marbles the fragment of the Athena statue found its way to the then newly-arranged Museum of Ancient Sculpture. Being only a fragment it was exhibited in a rather dark corner and could not be sufficiently well studied. A rough drawing in Gerhard's Antike Denkmäler and a very small illustration in Kieseritzky's Catalogue of 1901 were the only accessible publications.

This Index owes its origin to the deciphering of a folio printed in Greek in Paris in 1628. As other books came under my eye, I found that in addition to the ligatures which I had analysed there were still many others, and I was so beguiled by their manifold and often obscure forms that I went far afield in my researches. It was surprising, no less than disconcerting, that with the exception of Proctor, to whom reference will presently be made, no one in modern days had occupied himself with a phase of Greek typography which, owing to its crabbedness and elusive contractions, based no doubt upon the Tironian practices of the scribes, had estranged students from the study of later Greek literature.

Beginning with the Baskerville fount of 1763, I worked backwards, overtaking the Paris fount, till, with a Froben as a complication, I was entangled in an Aldine. This led me to Proctor's erudite monograph on The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century, which was of great value, for by its means I was able to verify my own decipherings and at the same time to add to my list fresh examples from the texts and founts which he had analysed.

Apart from Proctor's work only three lists were accessible. The first was that of Aldus Manutius (1494–5), who gave clues to the more complicated sorts in one of his founts, adding that he passed over many ‘connexiones’ as they could be identified very easily. The next list was that printed at the end of the Greek Grammar of Ramus (Hanover, 1605), in which the Aldine ‘connexiones’ were included and others as well, a thoughtful proceeding if the Grammar was to be of any use, for it was printed almost entirely in ligatures.