During the excavations at Mycenae in 1953, a Protogeometric cist burial was discovered in the House of Shields, sunk into the floor of its west room. This burial, numbered Tomb PG 601, was published, with other burials, in BSA XLIX 258 ff. In the summer of 1954 Professor Wace uncovered three further burials in the House of Shields. These, at his most kind invitation, I publish here.

General situation (Fig. 1). Whereas tomb PG 601 was found at the southern end of the west room of the House of Shields, these three, here numbered 602, 603, and 604, appeared in the north-western corner of this same room. Only a few feet separate the one from the others, as will be clear from the plan, and 602 and 603 seem to have been placed under the shelter of the west wall. The area had been to a certain extent disturbed, but whether there may have been further burials between 601 and this group of three I cannot tell. None was found in the excavation.

I Propose here to discuss briefly the topography of the triangular district which is bounded on the west by the range of Taygetus, on the east by the sea from the mouth of the Eurotas to the Bay of Skutari, and on the north by an imaginary line drawn from the mouth of the Eurotas due west to Taygetus.

The sequence of construction of the Propylaia to the Acropolis of Athens is reassessed in the light of Pontus Hellstrom's suggestion that the two unbuilt east halls, and the original plan for the S.W. hall were intended to be dining halls like the Pinakotheke. It is argued that the objections of the various priests are unlikely to account for changes in plan; that the east halls were abandoned before work started on the S.W. wing; and that the cause of the change was financial, the need to economize in the face of the growing certainty of war with Sparta.

The inscribed fragments here published were discovered in the third season of the excavations at Palaikastro. We knew already that a Hellenic temple had stood on the site of the Minoan town. The building itself had been destroyed, but architectural terracottas, bronze shields, and other votive offerings were found near the surface in sufficient numbers to indicate its position, while a bed of ashes fixed that of the altar. The finding among its scattered débris of a Hymn addressed to Zeus of Dikte furnished a welcome identification. It left no doubt that our temple was the temple of Diktaean Zeus which is several times mentioned in the famous award of the Magnesian Arbitrators in the frontier dispute between Itanos and Hierapytna, and that the plain of Palaikastro was the Heleia which both cities claimed.

Two cemeteries associated with the early iron age occupation of Kourion have been excavated at the localities of Bamboula and Kaloriziki. In his publications of these cemeteries Benson attempted to demonstrate continuity of occupation at Kourion in the transitional bronze–iron age. A reanalysis of the pottery from both cemeteries has instead shown that the supposed continuity of occupation at Kourion is a result of Benson's erroneous identification of the final Late Cypriot and Initial Cypro-Geometric wares.

Rearrangement of the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos, emergency digs, chance finds, and interrupted projects of study have combined to leave the author with material which is largely disjointed though some can be welded into cohesive units. Presented partly in the form of a catalogue and partly as expanded notes, it may be useful to those working in the various periods and fields of Minoan studies.

The catalogue below covers some of the finds preserved in the Stratigraphical Museum from the excavations of Evans and Curators at Knossos, which they did not publish or which have been subsequently restored; to these have been added more recent chance finds and objects from emergency excavations in the Knossos area for which the author was responsible. This is followed by an account of some of Evans's deposits from the Palace which have a bearing on the relationship of MM IIIB and LM IA pottery.

The strict Lenten fast of the Greek Church is preceded by a carnival of a fortnight's duration. The week from Septuagesima Sunday to Sexagesima is celebrated with feasting and merriment subject to no religious restrictions; in the second week, although similar festivities continue, heightened rather than abated, no meat may be eaten; and on the morrow of Quinquagesima (for Monday is the first day of the Greek Lent), the full regulations as to fasting come into operation, not only meat, but fish, eggs, milk, cheese and oil being almost universally prohibited. None the less a free use of wine makes the Monday the climax of the carnival.

It is more than twenty years since John Boardman with his ‘Pottery from Eretria’, published in Volume xlvii of this Annual, aroused a fresh interest in the study of Euboean pottery. A certain amount of work has been done on the subject since then, but there has been no controlled digging of cemeteries from which the main lines of the development of Euboean vase-painting in the sixth and fifth centuries can be established. So owing to the lack of external evidence, research on the subject continues to advance in a haphazard fashion and consists to a great extent in guesswork based on scanty material, as has recently been pointed out by Dietrich von Bothmer in his ‘Euboean Black-figure in New York’, the latest contribution to the subject. I wish here to add some more to the small corpus of vases already attributed, observing their relationship to the three great Eretrian amphorae in Athens and to one another.

The scope and a summary of the results of the 1962–3 excavations at Palaikastro and their relation to the earlier work of 1902–6 were set out in Part I (BSA lx (1965) 249–52). There is no call to repeat those findings here, nor has further study made it necessary to make any significant revisions.

In this article we publish the Late Minoan IB and reoccupation pottery from Block N (excavation report in PK VI. 252) and from other tests, along with an account of work undertaken in the main area of the town at Palaikastro (Roussolakkos).

As before, the excavation report was written by L. H. Sackett, while M. R. Popham contributed the sections on the L.M. pottery. We are grateful to P. M. Warren for notes on the stone objects and to V. E. G. Kenna for a note on one sealstone.

The material still awaiting final study and publication consists principally of Early and Middle Minoan pottery from Kastri, tests in Block Χ, Block Γ, and Square H3.

To some additional notes on this series I have appended the accounts of Chios given in the three unpublished Isolarii, as samples of their style and scope. Chios is chosen as being the native island of Lupaz-zolo, the most important of the three authors.

The occurrence of formulae in Attic inscriptions is, of course, universally recognized, although it has perhaps become clear that an over-rigid approach towards them, particularly in fifth- and early fourth-century examples, is unwise. The usefulness of such formulae for restoration also depends to a certain extent on the volume and the spread of dated, or approximately dated, material available. In the case of citizenship grants the situation is particularly good since there not only exists a reasonably large and widespread set of more or less closely dated documents but the decrees themselves contain a peculiar feature which renders them especially susceptible to restoration. Indeed, there are some grounds for regarding decrees that record grants of citizenship as forming a special category among honorific decrees. The reason is that the full formula for recording the grant always consists of more than one distinct clause or element. There are always at least two clauses involved, each of which (apart from the simple statement of the grant) refers to a specific and necessary point of procedure; and each of these elements of the full formula has its own individual formula in the sense of having a distinct method of expression. Thus, in citizenship decrees, even when the form of expression within the individual elements is open to variation, the general, or over-all, formula for the grant remains the same in a given period, in that the individual elements themselves remain. For instance, in the earliest grants the total granting formula embraced two separate elements, namely the statement of the grant, and the enrolment of the recipient into a deme and tribe and phratry. Both of these elements could be (and were) expressed in slightly different ways, but the two points themselves are always present in the record. So the over-all granting formula is the same.

The distinction between L.H. IIA and L.H. IIB as stylistic and historical phases was set out by Furumark over twenty years ago, but the terms have still not come into general use. Instead, L.H. II is treated as a unit, roughly equivalent to the fifteenth century B.C. Yet it is now generally agreed that there was an important historical ‘break’ in the middle of the century, marked by the destruction of many sites in Crete, which roughly coincides with the suggested division between L.H. IIA and L.H. IIB. The distinction between material preceding and following this ‘break’ on the mainland is likely to be of importance for the general history of the period.

In his discussion of these phases, Furumark was forced to rely very largely on tomb-groups, and his total material was not very great. He was conscious that additional evidence was needed for L.H. I and L.H. IIA, and commented on the general dearth of stratified material, accepting only one site, Korakou, as showing a L.H. I–II stratification.

The two white lekythoi illustrated in Plate 40 a–b and Figs. 1–2 were found together in a basement of the National Museum in Athens. The provenience is unknown. They are restored, and have necks, mouths, and handles belonging to other lekythoi. The height of the ancient parts is 0·33 m. The outlines of the drawing are a mixture of matt red and brown; the added colours are mauve, green, and light brown. No vent-hole is visible in either of them.

The subject of the composition on no. 19272 (Plate 40 a and Fig. 1) is a visit to the grave. There is a grave stele in the middle, projecting on to the shoulder of the vase; it rests on a step and has three shafts, one rising from the other. The lowest shaft is the broadest, the middle one the highest. The two lower shafts are crowned by a plinth. From each plinth two tiers of acanthus leaves rise, in outline, or painted mauve, green, or light brown. These enrich the stele, diminish the excessive elevation, and add balance. From the lowest leaves of the upper acanthus group two woollen sashes hang, the left-hand one green, the other mauve. A third sash, green, hangs from the upper border band to left of the stele. Behind the stele, a trapeza, resting on a couple of steps, gives more stability to the general aspect of the monument.

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.

In his concluding article in a recent series published in Kadmos, Professor Palmer, in considering Popham's study of the destruction of the Palace of Knossos, first questions, and then rejects, the existence of an earth baulk in the North Entrance Passage, said to lie immediately outside the opening to the west, which now houses the steps leading up on to the Bull Relief Portico. As Palmer notes, the existence of the ‘baulk’ and its identification as the source of the 1913 Test Pit 79 material was first put forward in 1960 by Boardman on the strength of evidence found among photographs by Sir Arthur Evans, which are now stored in the Ashmolean Museum.

The pottery described below was picked up by Mr. Cuttle and myself on mounds, many of which have been noted by Wace or Rey (locc. citt.). We have retained their numbering, so as to avoid confusion. Of the mounds mentioned by Rey, we visited his 2, 3, 4, 5, but not 1, 6, 7, 8. Of those noted and visited by Wace we re-examined A 3, B 8, B 9 and C 9. Of those noted but not visited by him, we visited B 12, B 13, B 15. We could not identify his B 14. On B 13 we found no sherds at all, and it may be a burial tumulus, like A 3. We also collected sherds from a site (not a mound) in the hills one hour north-east of Gerakiní, shewn us by Mr. Bliss of the Anglo-Hellenic Magnesite Company at Gerakiní, and from three mounds in the Ormylia valley, marked Ormylia 1,2 2, 3 on the map (Pl. VI, 1).

The Greek Love-god of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era may perhaps be looked upon as an amalgamation of three distinct divine entities. Eros was Love, the creative desire of nature, and as such the soul within god and man; Eros was the love-child, son of Aphrodite-Cypris; Eros was the idealisation of human beauty beloved.

In the ancient cult centres of Thespiae and Parium the god was apparently not so much the personification of human love as a great physical and elemental force of nature. As such he ranks among the three primaeval Forces in the Theogony of Hesiod, who opens with these words his tale of creation (116 ff.): ‘Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos and dim Tartaros in the wide-pathed earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and counsels within them of all gods and all men.’ This is apparently the Eros who figured in the earliest Orphic Theogony, concerning which A. B. Cook has collected a wealth of material. He reconstructs partially the contents, which possibly told that in the beginning was Nyx. Black-winged Nyx laid an egg from which ‘sprang golden-winged Eros. Apparently heaven and earth were regarded as the upper and lower halves of the vast egg.’

This inscription consists of two decrees, one of which gives a certain Sthorys the Athenian citizenship, the other of which provides for a simple amendment. Despite fairly numerous editions, a number of difficulties of detail remain which seem sufficient to warrant a further discussion. In the first place, the most recent editors, Wilhelm and Meritt, while agreeing on the general substance of the text, have a number of discrepancies in their readings, though neither has provided a detailed commentary on the readings adopted. In addition, the full implications of fragment (b) have not been taken into account hitherto. Secondly, Sthorys, the recipient, is a very shadowy figure, and the precise circumstances in which he received Athenian citizenship are not altogether clear. Thirdly, the formula employed for the grant of citizenship in this decree is somewhat unusual compared with that found in other such decrees of the fifth and early fourth centuries. The purpose of this article therefore is, firstly, to provide a new text with a full critical commentary, and also to consider the physical details of the stele; secondly, to consider fully the contents of the two decrees, and in particular the status of Sthorys and the possible reasons for his honours; and finally, to discuss the formula for the grant of citizenship in this decree and in the other preserved examples of the fifth and early fourth centuries.