At one time it was generally assumed, even by distinguished Byzantinists, that the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 put a sudden stop to the production of all objects of quality in the East Christian world, and that after that date Byzantine art at once degenerated into a peasant art throughout the whole of the area touched by the Turks. Recent research has, however, led to some modification of this view, and though work of the same superb quality as that produced in the great middle period of Byzantine art was not executed, we now know that in addition to painted icons, such things as embroideries, carved reliquaries, crosses of chased metal work or champlevé enamel and objects in bone or even ivory, were produced, which were by no means negligible from the artistic standpoint. Their production continued, moreover, through the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries; only after that date did Christian art in Greece and the Balkans assume an essentially ‘peasant’ character. It is indeed to the sixteenth century that the greater number of painted icons that are now to be found in museums and private collections in Greece are to be assigned, and though there was much hack-work, paintings of very high quality were also produced amongst them.

In the Addendum to the editio minor Kirchner quotes with approval the opinion of Wilhelm that the two fragments published separately as IG ii2. 121 and IG ii2. 185 belong together. As far as I have been able to ascertain, this suggestion has never been withdrawn. There are, however, a number of reasons which make it clear that this proposed join must be rejected.

Both pieces are of white marble and are housed in the Epigraphical Museum at Athens. IG ii2. 121 (= EM 6958) constitutes the top right part of a stele and has a right edge preserved. The dimensions are: maximum height 0·366 m., maximum width 0·222 m., maximum thickness 0·151 m. The surface is rather badly worn. Part of the bottom of a heading in large letters (of 22 mm. height) is preserved at the very top. Below this there is an uninscribed space of 0·113 m., followed by the remains of some six lines of text which comprise part of the prescript of the decree.

During the course of travel and exploration that we have carried out during the last three years in Thessaly, and South Macedonia, Mr. M. S. Thompson and myself have discovered that in these regions a carnival play similar to that seen by Mr. Dawkins in Thrace is still performed on certain occasions. It is surprising that these festivals have for so long escaped the notice of travellers, for the area in which they occur is a large one, and they were more extensively celebrated in days gone by. Mr. G. F. Abbott seems to be the only traveller who has noticed them, and even he has misunderstood them.

We must bear in mind two fundamental facts, which are basic to the theme of this paper: first, that Egypt more than any other land has influenced the Minoan-Mycenaean civilisation, and second, that the free adaptation and fusion of Egyptian motives is a typical phenomenon of Aegean art and mentality.

Something has already been written about Egyptian influence in the art of the Shaft Graves of Mycenae. I hope to show, in a forthcoming paper, that this connection is even greater, extending its influence not only in art (in just that point the influence is not great), but also and especially in material matters and in deep religious and funerary ideas. Here we will discuss a very well known and ‘curious’ object of early Mycenaean art, the gold and silver pin from the Third Shaft Grave (Fig. 1).

In the course of a search for tombs in the Knossos area during the spring of 1951 I noticed some large blocks of limestone masonry with curved edges that had just been removed from a newly planted vineyard, the property of Georgios Kargatzes, near the top of the hill forming the southern end of the long ridge on the northern tip of which stands the Isopata Royal Tomb. The site is about 250 metres north-west of the Zafer Papoura cemetery of Late Minoan tombs dug by Evans in 1904, and at the bottom of the slope to the west is a high bank with important Geometric tombs (Knossos Survey 15), explored by Hogarth during the first year of the excavations at Knossos in 1900.

The curving blocks, together with the situation on the top of a hill less than half a kilometre south of the Kefala tholos tomb (Knossos Survey 8), excavated by Mr. R. W. Hutchinson in 1939, immediately raised hopes that another tholos tomb might await discovery here; and the fragments of Minoan pottery everywhere on and below the surface encouraged this belief. Dr. N. Platon, Ephor of Antiquities for Crete, visited the site and granted permission for the School to make trials to discover from what the blocks came. The Director of the School, Mr. J. M. Cook, gave his sanction for the work and asked me to undertake it. The plans were drawn by Mr. Piet de Jong, then the School's Curator at Knossos; the drawings of the vases are by Miss Susan Wood.

In the spring of 1962 workmen digging the foundation shafts for the construction of a house at Atsalenio hit upon two Geometric tombs. Atsalenio is a quarter outside Heraklion, midway between the city centre and Knossos. The site of the tombs, which is the property of the contractors, D. Ritsopoulos and D. Serdherakis, lies about 100 metres to the west of the road to Knossos and about 200 metres to the north of the modern graveyard of Atsalenio. As the tombs were just outside the Knossos area of the British School, although belonging to the Geometric cemeteries of Knossos, I undertook their excavation as Epimelete of the Archaeological Service.

The site of the tombs, like most of the adjacent area, was a vineyard before building began, and the soil was cultivated to a depth of c. 0·7 m. This had destroyed the roofs of the tombs. The digging of the foundation shafts for the building had also destroyed all but the beginning of the dromos of Tomb A and had just reached the upper level of its burials before work was halted. Nearly all Tomb B, too, had been destroyed; the sherds from it were recovered for the most part from the earth thrown out by the builders.

This paper presents in detail a deposit of metallurgical debris from a small-scale casting operation at Palaikastro, E. Crete. The deposit consists of a selection of discarded metalworking tools, including tuyères (blowpipes), crucibles, and moulds, all of which are indicative of different processes involved in the production of metal objects. The moulds offer rare evidence for the local manufacture of specific object types that can be identified from the fragmentary remains. In addition to moulds for various tool types, such as double axes, there are fragments of moulds for a large decorative stand similar to the ‘rod’ tripod stands found predominantly on Cyprus. This is the first evidence for production of these stands on Crete at such an early date.

In discussing the so-called Alexandrian Grotesques in a paper in this Annual last year I expressed the opinion that they should be assigned to Campanian art. I have, however, since then been enabled to study these grotesques more closely; and have in consequence been led to modify my former opinion very considerably. Though these grotesques were very popular in Italy during the late republican and the imperial periods, they were by no means peculiar to the west. They fall naturally into several classes, which, for convenience, are here given in tabular form.

The Byzantine coinage in the twelfth century was of three kinds. There were gold nomismata, with a purchasing power which must have been a good deal greater than that of a present-day five-pound note, and also nomismata of ‘pale gold’—gold alloyed with silver—of lower value; at the other extreme there were bronze coins, smaller than a modern farthing, which were the coinage of the market-place; intermediate, but still of low value, there were coins about the size of a halfpenny, normally made of copper lightly washed with silver. The silvered bronze and the gold were not flat, as are most coins, but saucer-shaped. The reason for their unusual form is not known. Numismatists describe them as scyphate, and refer to the middle denomination in the later Byzantine system of coinage as Scyphate Bronze, to distinguish it from the petty bronze coinage. Scyphate Bronze was first struck under Alexius I (1081–1118). Substantive issues were made by John II (1118–43), and such coinage became extremely plentiful under Manuel I (1143–80) and his successors Isaac II (1185–95) and Alexius III (1195–1203). After the capture of Constantinople in the course of the Fourth Crusade, the successor-states to the Byzantine Empire at Nicaea, Salonica, and in Epirus continued to issue scyphate bronze coinage, although in much smaller quantities, until after the middle of the thirteenth century.

Laconian figurines have been found on four sites at or in the neighbourhood of Sparta: by the British excavations at the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, at the Menelaion, and on the Acropolis at the Sanctuary of Athena of the Brazen House: and by the Greek and, subsequently, the German excavations at the Amyklaion. So far as I know only three archaic Laconian figurines have been found on sites which are not Laconian. Of these, two are from Tegea, a site which was open to Laconian, Argive and Corinthian influences; these two objects will be mentioned below. The third is the late archaic terracotta head from Olympia, which Langlotz classes as Sicyonian, but which is much more akin to late archaic Laconian heads. One would expect that seventh-century figurines of Laconian style would have been found at Tarentum, but as almost no archaic terracottas from that site have been published it is impossible to say whether such exist or no: the few I have seen in Berlin do not present any striking similarity with those from Laconia, although one of them is akin to the Cretan heads of about 625.

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.

This article continues my observations on the temple of Poseidon published in BSA xlv (1950) 78 ff. I begin with what I have recently noticed of the architectural detailing and decoration of this temple. Zschietzschmann (AA 1929, 223 f.) noticed a painted pattern of a very unexpected design on the inner taenia of the architrave. It is a well-kept rule in Greek architecture that the decoration of a moulding should echo its profile. So a taenia of rectangular section, assuming that it needed decoration at all, should have had some sort of Greek fret (for which see below). At Sunium, however, it has the Oriental Coil, an ornament which, in any case, is oftener seen on Ionic buildings than on Doric. In Doric, indeed, it is known to have established itself in only one position, on a certain type of flat clay cornice-revetment, probably invented in Corinth, found in a primitive form, and not quite, perhaps, in its canonical position, on the temple of Artemis at Corcyra, and thereafter stereotyped on the monotonous, sub-Corinthian clay cornice-revetments churned out in Sicily during the century down to 480 B.C. At Sunium one can only suppose that the Oriental Coil brought the Doric architrave of the side ptera into greater harmony with the Ionic of the east pteron.

Although the slopes of the καστρί had been rifled by native diggers there were indications on the southern side, at a site called Τὰ ῾Ελληνικά that something still remained. The trial pits struck at once two small burial-enclosures, lying close together. The northern of the two proved to be a structure some six by seven metres, with the western wall lacking, divided into two unequal compartments.

Upper Macedonia is the upland country which lies at the back of Mount Bermius as regards Macedonia properly so-called, which is the Campagna between the hills and the sea at the head of the Gulf of Salonica. Beyond the hills Olympus, Bermius, and their continuation northward, lies Upper Macedonia about the valleys of the Haliakmon and Erigon and round the lakes of Ochrida, Presba and Kastoria. This was the fourth region of Macedonia according to the Roman division after the defeat of Perseus at Pydna in 168. This region according to Livy included Eordaia, Lynkestis, Pelagonia, Stymphalis (sic), Elimiotis and Atintania. The country to-day falls naturally by its geographical features into several divisions and these correspond, as far as our information goes, with the ancient districts. Going westwards from Edessa along the line of the Via Egnatia, near the lakes, of which Lake Ostrovo is the chief, the traveller first reaches some hilly country which forms the watershed between the valleys of the Erigon and Haliakmon. To the north in the valley of the Erigon is a long, narrow plain stretching from Fiorina past Monastir to just beyond Krushevo and Prilep. The northern part of this plain is itself separated from the rest by a low range of hills about the villages of Tsepik and Topoltsani.

In the last volume of the Annual a report was given on the work done at Haliartos in 1926. It was not possible at that time to publish the excavation exhaustively as the finds had not been thoroughly examined, but I have recently made a further study of them, and have prepared this supplementary paper to bring the publication up to date. The finds are here catalogued and discussed under their several sections, and the conclusions derived from them are set out in the summary at the end.

This article publishes the terracotta thymiateria (incense burners) from Olbia Pontica which represent busts of Aphrodite with Erotes on her shoulders. They were used probably in activities related to Aphrodite's cult for diffusing incense and as votives. They derive from excavations at houses, a stoa and the bothroi (sacrificial pits) at the central and western temene; they date to the period between the late third and the first half of the second centuries bc. The publication of such items coincides with ongoing research into the southern sacral precinct in Olbia dedicated to Aphrodite. This article explores the significance of the iconography of these objects and their use in cult activity related to the cult of Aphrodite at Olbia.

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.

The cuneiform tablet from the Hittite capital Hattusa/Boğazköy, KUB XXIII. 13, reports Hittite warfare in western/north-western Asia Minor around 1240 BC, when the so-called Seha River Land fought against the Hittites and their king Tuthaliyas IV As the date of the war is contemporary with the sack of ‘Mycenaean’ Troy VI, there is a possibility that the conflict described in the tablet could have provided the historical background for the Iliad. Moreover, the etymology of the River Seha seems to be the same as that of the Scamander at Hisarlik, but the Dardanelles could also originally have had that name.

This article argues for a revision of the theories and assumed production methods used in Hellenistic and Roman mosaic glass. Knowing how glass behaved in different circumstances under differing heat processes allowed for the possibility of experimenting and demonstrating the inconsistencies in many of the accepted explanations of mosaic production. Experiments were run to test new production ideas, contrasting the findings with previously suggested production methods. The findings bring into question many of the accepted hypotheses for mosaic production. The evidence and hypotheses formed from the experiments challenge many of the traditionally held ideas for the production of this glass and reinforce the need for experimental and practice-based approaches to this type of work.