In Turkish geographical nomenclature certain ‘round’ numbers are regularly employed in an arbitrary sense. Most important of these are ‘a thousand and one’ (bin bir), used to express the idea of ‘countless,’ and ‘forty’ (kirk), which is similarly used for ‘numerous.’ As examples of the first may be cited the well-known ‘thousand-and-one-column’ (Bin Bir Direk) cistern at Constantinople and the ‘Thousand and one Churches’ (Bin Bir Kilisse) in Lycaonia. For the second we may instance several rivers called Kirk Getchid (‘Forty Fords’, in Greek Sarandáporos), the town Kirk Agatch (‘Forty Trees’), springs called Kirk Gueuz (‘Forty Eyes’), districts called Kirk In, Kirk Er (‘Forty Caves’) and numerous others.

Side by side with names like the foregoing, which explain themselves if we read ‘numerous’ for ‘forty,’ we find certain localities denominated simply ‘the Forty’ (Tk. Kirklar, Gr. Saránda). They are especially common in Pontus but occur also elsewhere, as e.g. in Mysia, where there are at least two villages called Kirklar, and in Caria, where the name is applied to a site with ruins of a church near the ancient Loryma and to an ancient tomb east of Knidos. Similarly mysterious are names like Kirklar Dagh (‘Mountain of the Forty,’ not ‘Forty Mountains’) which like the foregoing, imply an association with forty persons. These ‘forties’ call for explanation.

The new Rome inherited from the old a strategic situation in the Mediterranean world that was essentially similar at the beginning of the seventh century to what it had been in the first. Persia, vetus hostis, was still a threat in the east, while in the north there was the less organized but no less persistent threat of migratory peoples pressing across the Danube. By the middle of the seventh century the Byzantine supremacy in the east Mediterranean had been destroyed, and a profound reshaping of the state had been set in train. In discussing some coins and coin hoards from the reign of Heraclius (610–41), I wish to draw attention to the place of the Aegean coastlands in the regional economy of the Byzantine Empire as it was before the Arab expansion. The revival of commerce in the provinces in the ninth century seems to have begun in the coastal cities of the Aegean: this prompts an inquiry into their importance in the sixth and seventh centuries.

The second and third decades of the seventh century were a time of disaster for the Empire, when it was attacked from both the east and the north. The Persian armies conquered Syria in 611 and thereafter were able to make incursions into western Asia Minor, on occasion reaching as far as the shores of the Bosporus. Thomas Presbyter records that they carried captives away from Rhodes, while in the same year the Slavs invaded Crete. The Miracula S. Demetrii gives a graphic account of a naval blockade of Salonica by the Slavs and mentions sea raids on the whole of Thessaly and near-by places and the Greek islands which depopulated many cities and regions. The Avars, in alliance with Slavs, Bulgars, and Gepids, besieged Constantinople itself by land and sea, while the Persians occupied Chalcedon. The records of events in the first part of the reign of Heraclius are fragmentary in the extreme, and the chronology in particular has been the subject of much debate.

Continuing the lines laid down in 1906, the campaign of 1907 was confined entirely to the site of Sparta itself. Our thanks must again be expressed to the Hellenic Government and the Ephor-General of Antiquities for their continuous support. This year we have especially to mention the enlargement of the Sparta Museum. The number of our finds had made this necessary, as the two rooms and entrance-hall of the old Museum were quite full when our work began. Two rooms have now been added to the right and left of the old building, doubling its original capacity. These rooms we have found most useful for purposes of study, and for arranging and repairing the finds, and we are especially grateful for the speed with which this improvement has been carried out.

Certain wooden fragments from tomb V at Mycenae are identified as parts of two small tripod tables, which constitute the best-preserved furniture from the prehistoric Aegean. As the epigraphic, iconographic, and archaeological evidence demonstrates, wooden furniture was not common in the Aegean area and belonged chiefly to prosperous persons, who rarely provided it to the dead. Statistically rare, though more widely known, are the wooden structures used from the end of MM III to the LH/LM III A2 period for burials, nearly all richly endowed (with weapons, metal vessels, ornaments, even with furniture). In tombs with multiple burials the dead person, placed on a bed or a bier, is isolated and raised above the others. Burial in a coffin, of whatever material, constitutes a means of individualizing the dead: the wooden coffin has additional value. Thus these modes of burial are explained as one of the customs adopted during the New Palace and Early Mycenaean period, in order to demonstrate the social and economic status of the prominent dead.

The provenance of vessels of the Marine Style of LMIB from Crete and LHIIA from the Mainland remains an important unsolved problem. This article describes an attempt to discriminate between selected Mainland and Cretan specimens by multivariate analysis of the compositions of their fabrics determined by optical emission spectroscopy with the aim of determining whether the Mainland Marine Style pieces were indeed made on the Mainland, perhaps locally at their find spots, or were imported from Crete or the islands. Accordingly Marine Style sherds have been sampled from seven Mainland, two island, and two Cretan sites, together with a large number of definitively local sherds from each site to serve as a control over the characteristics of the local clays. A distribution map, Fig. 1, and a corpus, as complete as possible, defining and describing the motifs and shapes used in the Marine Style from the Mainland, Crete, and the islands as a whole is included below in order to provide an overview of the available information.

Evidence of the Minoan Linear A script in the West Magazines at Knossos is surprisingly thin. Whereas at other important Minoan sites bookkeeping is fairly well attested, and at Hagia Triadha abundantly so, nothing has appeared from Knossos. Of the few graffiti and texts on pithoi published so far, only two are well documented. The others were published by Brice after drafts by Evans. As the latest publication (1982) still relies on Evans's drafts, it seemed reasonable to assume that the pithoi had not been examined for signs since their discovery in 1900–1. In this short article the first, and still tentative, results of such a study are published.

The fragment which I publish here by the kind permission of Dr. J. Papademetriou lies in the courtyard of the Piraeus Museum. Of its origins nothing can be said. It does not appear in the Museum inventory, and all that can be affirmed for certain is that it was already in the Museum in January 1937, when Mr. J. G. Griffith made a squeeze which is now in the Ashmolean Museum. This squeeze besides its chronological value is also helpful, in that it shows rather more than can now be read on the stone.

Fragment of Pentelic marble with left-hand edge and original rough-picked back preserved. Height: 0·352 m.; width: 0·349 m.; thickness: 0·152 m. Uninscribed left margin of 0·026 m. Uninscribed space below last line of at least 0·110 m. Cut with two chisels of 10 mm. and 6 mm., the smaller being employed for the cross-bars of epsilon, alpha, and the aspirate, the horizontal and right vertical of pi, and all three strokes of upsilon and sigma. Horizontal chequer: 0·0137 m.; vertical chequer: 0·0194 m. (Plate 51a).

This little pot—two and a half inches high, something less across—is said to have been found in Athens (Pls. III, IV, and Figs. 1-2). It is an oil-pot of the shape now known as a round aryballos. Whether an Athenian would have called our vase an aryballos is doubtful: he would have called it a lekythos or lekythion, for an Attic vase of the same shape and period, found in an Athenian grave, bears the legend A sōpodōrou hē lēkythos, ‘the lekythos belongs to Asopodoros.“ But lekythos is a wide term, covering not only that slender vase (in its numerous varieties) to which we usually confine the word; but also the squat, stable version of the same; and the so-called protocorinthian aryballos of the seventh century; and perhaps, at a pinch, even the alabastron.

When the British School decided to bring to an end its excavations at Sparta in the year 1910, after five campaigns, it was fully aware that the possibilities of the site were by no means exhausted. Its varied activities before the war, at Phylakopi and in Crete, and after the war at Mycenae, have formed the subjects of full reports in various volumes of the Annual from XVII (1910–11) onwards, but when Mr. Wace's tenure of the Directorship came to an end, the decision of the Committee to resume work on a site of the Classical period led to the renewal of work at Sparta forming their first choice. The fact that the new Director had taken an active part in three of the five original campaigns was an additional reason for returning there, and it was accordingly resolved to resume operations in 1924, with the Theatre as the first objective; and in hopes, moreover, of carrying out a fuller exploration of the Acropolis, and also of gaining fresh information as to the topography of ancient Sparta by extensively testing portions of the ancient city previously unexamined. The principal results of the work of the two seasons, 1924 and 1925, form the subject of the present report.

A Survey of the Marine Style shows that we may categorize octopods and argonauts into Types A and B, according to the drawing of the suckers in their tentacles. Type A suckers enclose a dot; Type B have no dot. All the instances of Type A and Type B are displayed against a crowded Marine background.

We may further distinguish a third class (Type C) of octopods and argonauts; small compact creatures whose suckers are reduced to knobs, while the argonaut shells are no more than sketchily drawn, the striations being placed haphazardly, either vertically or horizontally. These motifs are displayed against an open background.

These notes are for the most part devoted to questions of phonetics, dealing more with Lautlehre than with Formenlehre, and do not pretend to give a complete account of the dialect. I have thought this side of the subject most worth developing, because it is that which native collectors, excellent from the sides of lexicography and literature, are apt to neglect.

The dialect of Karpathos belongs to the south-eastern or south-Sporadic group of modern Greek dialects, which extends over Cyprus, Rhodes, Kos, Kalymnos, and other islands as far north as Chios. Its connexion with Cretan has also been recognized.

On March 31st, 1903, and the three following days I conducted a trial excavation at a site situated at about an hour's distance from Roussolakkos, and known as Hagios Nikolaos from a small church of that name. During the first three days I employed ten men, on the fourth only two.

The most prominent feature of the landscape is the height called Módhi (1776 ft.). From the foot of this there runs almost due east a deep valley with a river-bed, which, although quite dry at the time when I saw it, must sometimes carry off a considerable volume of water from the surrounding hills. The valley is at first narrow and its sides very steep, but a little way above the chapel it broadens out considerably: although the left bank is steep and in places almost precipitous, the right side rises in a gentle slope, forming a series of terraces which are under cultivation and afford a good harvest in spite of the stony character of the soil. It is on this southern slope that the chapel stands, situated on a small outcrop of rock and surrounded by cornfields.

This cist tomb was uncovered in 1959 during the excavation of the House of Sphinxes,2 and it lay at a distance of only 2 m. from tomb PG 606 (see fig. I and BSA li. 114 fig. 5).

It was built on the rock where there was a natural angle and a fairly sharp slope from west to east. The floor of the tomb was in fact for the most part the rock itself, but at the east end a number of small stones, overlying Mycenaean debris, were used. It was of rectangular shape, and orientated W.-E. The west and south walls of the tomb were provided by the rock; two large worked slabs, set upright, formed the north-east corner, and for the rest natural stones were used to line the tomb. There was no evidence of any roofing slabs, nor can one see how such could have been fixed. The inner dimensions were 1·78 × 0·68 m., and the two walling slabs had a height of 0·60 m.

The recent publication of the Attic black-figured pottery from the sanctuary of Aphaia on Aegina has brought into question the widely accepted date for the construction of the late archaic temple and its sculpture. Much of the pottery comes from the terrace system around the temple which preceded the building's construction. 47.7% of the black-figured pottery is later than the commonly assumed date of c. 510 for the destruction and rebuilding of the temple. Using the latest pottery and the widely accepted Studniczka-Langlotz chronology a terminus post quem is provided during the time of the Persian Wars. The range of pottery also shows that the terrace fills around the temple fall into the same chronological horizon as deposits at Athens which have been linked to the Persian destruction and may, in fact, be even later. The historical context for the rebuilding seems to be in the affluent years after the Persian Wars when the cities of Greece were able to benefit from booty won on the field of battle.

In January 1959, when a trench was being dug in order to lay a water pipe in connection with the building of an orphanage (Κέντρον βρεφῶν “Ἤ Μητέρα”) on the south edge of Ayios Ioannis between Knossos and Herakleion a sinking of the ground suggested the presence of a collapsed tomb chamber. As the site lay within the Knossos area, Dr. St. Alexiou, Ephor of Antiquities for Crete, kindly invited the School to make trials there during the course of their excavations at Knossos in the summer of 1959.

The tomb which these trials revealed proved to be Minoan, and assignable to the L.M. II period, to judge from the remains of a couple of clay vases, a stemmed goblet (A.1) and an alabastron (A.2), which had evidently belonged with the original burial or burials. The deep-cut dromos, narrow with distinctly inward leaning sides, was of a type which it is often suggested may be of Mycenaean origin. But this is disputable, and the tomb at Ayios Ioannis appears to be as early as, if not earlier than, any of the tombs with this type of dromos on the Greek mainland. At Mycenae itself tombs with dromoi like this are not attested before L.H. III. On the other hand both at Mycenae and at Knossos there are tombs with shorter dromoi whose sides lean inwards, and some of these tombs may be earlier in date. Tomb 529 at Mycenae, with a short dromos whose sides lean markedly inwards, is assignable to L.H. I–II.

The area over which the Tsakonian dialect is spoken lies on the east coast of the Peloponnese between the Parnon range and the sea. Its northern boundary is roughly the torrent which, rising on Parnon above Kastánitsa, flows into the sea near Ayios Andréas, its southern the torrent which, also rising on Parnon, passes through Lenídhi to the sea. A mountain range stretches along the coast from end to end of the district, reaching its highest point (1114 metres) in Mt. Sevetíla above the village of Korakovúni. Between Tyrós and Pramateftí, the seaward slopes of this range are gentle and well covered with soil. Behind these coast hills there stretches a long highland plain, known as the Palaiókhora, which, in the north, is fairly well covered with soil, but gradually rises towards the south into a region of stony grazing land, and terminates abruptly in the heights above Lenídhi. The high hill of Oríonda rises out of the Palaiókhora to the west and forms a natural centre-point of the whole district. Behind it stretching up to the bare rock of Parnon, is rough hilly country, cut here and there by ravines and offering but rare patches of cultivable land.

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.

John Covel, afterwards Master of Christ's College, Cambridge, visited Athos from Lemnos on his way from Constantinople to England in the spring of 1677. His letter of recommendation from Nointel (which he hoped might be of use if he fell amongst French ‘privateers’) and his circular letter to the monasteries from Manolaki Petrovitzes are preserved in his correspondence.

The Athos notes are bound partly in the Folio MS. (Add. 22, 912) and partly in the Quarto (Add. 22, 914). They are very hastily written and ill arranged. I have therefore taken considerable liberties with the text, revising punctuation, resolving contractions, and (for the convenience of the reader) often transcribing words written wholly or partly in the Greek character; such words are indicated by italics.

The Hieron of Athena Chalkioikos was identified and to a large extent excavated in 1907, by the late Mr. Guy Dickins, who completed the task in the following year. Accounts of these campaigns, and of the principal finds, were published by him in the Annual (xiii. pp. 137–154, and xiv. pp. 142–146, respectively). This undertaking was practically limited to the thorough exploration of the area enclosed within the wall of the Hieron (B.S.A. xiii., l.c., Fig. 1), and except for the uncovering of the south face of the south wall, and for one trial trench about twenty metres in length, running southwards from the centre of this wall, no excavation took place to the south of the Precinct, in the area contained between it and the retaining-wall of the cavea of the theatre below. As this trench had yielded a large quantity of pottery, including fine fragments of the local Geometric style, a systematic exploration of this area seemed a duty, to be undertaken without delay, when operations were resumed in 1924.

Work commenced on April 7th, 1924, and lasted until the end of the season (May 31st); in 1925, from April 13th to May 30th. The number of men employed seldom exceeded ten, though about sixteen were at work in the second half of May 1924.

The village of Angelona lies amongst the hills surrounding the plain of Molai, midway between the latter and Monemvasia. About half an hour east of the village is a small plateau known as Kollýri; this plateau is bounded on its south-eastern side by a revma, tributary to the greater ravine which runs down to the sea south of the ruins of Epidaurus Limera. At the head of the revma is a perpetual spring of good water, and in its neighbourhood are many traces of former human occupation; roof tiles of slightly concave section with a rough red-to-black glaze, and sherds of black-glazed and coarse red pottery are common. A few hundred yards above (west of) the spring an anta capital of poros (Fig. 1) lies on the surface; the block measures 0·82 m. in length, 0·80 in breadth and 0·23 in thickness, and is remarkable because the profile is continuous on the long side but only extends for 0·33 m. on the other. On one end there are traces of an attempt to work the profile, and on the top a series of rough toolings (dowel holes?) parallel to the breadth.