No fewer than three of the inscriptions in the second volume of Dr. Tod's Greek Historical Inscriptions are directly concerned with Keos, and this encourages me to hope that he may find interest in this investigation. It arises from an inscription from Ioulis, published by Dunant and Thomopoulos, which is a close parallel to IG xii. 5. 594 (GHI 141), the sympolity-treaty between Keos and Hestiaia. It is nearly certainly a treaty with Eretria. It raises several interesting problems, but I should principally like to draw attention to the remarkable federal constitution of Keos which the two inscriptions taken together reveal.

I repeat the new text for convenience with some slight alterations. It is stoichedon, uses ο for ου, but the letter-forms can hardly fix it closer than 390–340.

This confirms Hiller's view that thesmophylakes and not nomophylakes were mentioned in ll. 4–5 of the old inscription and makes it necessary to restore there [καὶ Χῶρον] in l. 6. Dunant and Thomopoulos give a revised text of ll. 3–11, but the unevenness of their line-length and the three later places in the old text where omission of words has been assumed make me wonder whether the whole inscription should not be restored with a rather longer line. There are, however, some lines which are hard to expand, and I offer no solution.

The importance attached by Greek cities and their leading statesmen to the oracle of Ammon is a matter of common knowledge. That it was not consulted by Greeks only is shown by the story of its consultation by Croesus (Hdt. i. 46) nearly a century before Kimon sent to seek its advice shortly before his death. From Pausanias we learn that it was frequently consulted by Sparta and by the men of Elis; and that at Thebes there was a temple of Ammon, which can hardly be dated later than the middle of the fifth century, seeing that the statue of the deity, by Kalamis, was dedicated by Pindar. As the poet also sent a hymn in honour of Ammon, which Pausanias apparently saw for himself on his visit to the Oasis-sanctuary, it seems possible that he took the opportunity to visit the oracle when he went to Cyrene for the recital of the second ode in honour of Arkesilas' victory at Delphi in 462 B.C.

In spite of its misleading promise to Alcibiades that he would conquer Syracuse, Athenian faith in its responses was not shaken, and perhaps even strengthened by its hostile attitude to Lysander, but we have no explicit account of any individual Athenian consulting it after the fifth century. That its influence and repute continued throughout the fourth century is attested not only by Alexander's attitude to it, but by the increasing devotion to the cult of Ammon at Athens, for which we have abundant epigraphical evidence. Taking this in chronological order, the first item is a silver phiale dedicated to Ammon, weighing 802 dr. This had been among the votive offerings in charge of the Treasurers of Athena, since, at any rate, 375 B.C.

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.

I am grateful to Mr. R. G. Goodchild, Director of Antiquities, Cyrenaica, for permission to publish these two inscriptions, and also for much other assistance during a recent visit to Cyrene.

I: Rectangular altar of limestone, complete on all sides with moulding above and below, H. 0·71; W. 0·43; Th. 0·38; letters, of the fourth century B.C. c. 0·050–060. Plate 1 (a).

Seen by me, August 1961, at El-Beida.

Κωρής: This altar is now on the excavated site of El-Beida, the ancient Balagrai, the centre of an important cult of Asklepios, 16 kilometres west of Cyrene, having been found in the Italian fort at El-Beida a few years ago. It seems likely that it is the stone referred to by Oliverio as having been found at Messa, some 10 kilometres west of El-Beida, where archaeological exploration in 1918 brought to light some dedications to Demeter, Kore, and other deities, and also some rock-cut sanctuaries. It cannot therefore be used as evidence for the pre-Roman period at Balagrai.

The bronze vase (Heraklion 2460) shown in Plate 2 and Fig. 1 was found in 1936 by workmen digging to lay pipes beside the main road between A. Ioannis and Teke (Knossos Survey no. 10). With it were the black-figure fragments shown in Plate 3 a. The find was briefly noticed in JHS lvi (1936) 150. The late T. J. Dunbabin had intended to publish the pieces but had written a detailed description of the bronze vase only, which I have drawn upon below.

The bowl is 0·216 in diameter and 0·043 high, but the exact curve of the lower part is not certain. The bowl is made in one piece, with a slight inset at the edge. Over this fits the upper part. This is 0·218 in diameter (0·118 the inner diameter); its height from the inner edge is 0·04, from the outer edge 0·02. It carries two cast swing handles. The attachments for them are 0·046 long, smooth inside, and on the outside decorated with three heavy ribs of beading. The ‘scotiae’ between are marked by pairs of lines. The handles themselves are 0·086 wide, circular in section but flattened on the inside and outside, and with two beaded knobs. Between the handles are two gorgoneia: present widths 0·106 and 0·103. The faces are very broad. The eyelids are strongly marked and thicken at the edge, giving the impression that they are rolled back slightly from the staring eyeballs. There is an almost circular depression round the eyes which is only slightly shallower at the corners. The ridge of the eyebrows is very firm and a ridge runs vertically up the forehead like a tall bud. The nose is not, in its upper part, unduly broad; the fleshy part broadens very much at the base, leaving a considerable depression above it, slanting obliquely downwards. The cheek-bones are high, the angles of the jaw-bone very strongly marked and the chin consists of two bony prominences with a depression between.

The necropolis of the city of Tharros in Sardinia has been extremely prolific in tomb furniture, and many lamps have been found there. Over forty lamps from this site are in the collections of the British Museum. All were acquired at the same time, and most of them were said to be from tomb groups. The groups containing lamps are Tombs 1–10, 12, 16, 18–19, 22, 26, 30–31, 33, 60–63, 65–71 (the tomb numbers for the whole collection run from 1–33, 50–57, 60–63, and 65–71; there are thus several gaps in the sequence).

The great majority of the British Museum lamps from Tharros are of Athenian manufacture and with the recent publication of Howland's book on lamps from the Agora these can be dated very accurately. But unfortunately such is the indeterminate nature of the tomb groups themselves that these lamps cannot be used to date the objects said to have been found with them. As will be seen in the brief descriptions given below in the Catalogue, many of the objects found in a given tomb are in almost impossibe chronological juxtaposition to one another, and few tomb groups, if any, can be regarded as homogeneous (except perhaps the Roman tombs 50–57 with glass cinerary urns and brittleware pottery, which, being lampless, do not concern us here). But looking at the objects from the tomb groups with lamps as a whole, one might put forward the following remarks.

Excavations at Knossos by the British School under the direction of Mr. M. S. F. Hood have during the past few years added some new fragments to the collection of Linear B tablets. But the more notable accessions are of material which was excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900–4, but which had been mislaid, lost, stolen, or even given away. It has become increasingly clear that Evans regarded the smaller fragments as of no importance; he kept no record of about two-thirds of the fragments he recovered, and the published edition, completed by Sir John Myres, contains no more than a selection, though it includes all the largest and best-preserved tablets. It does not seem to have occurred to Evans that even the smallest fragment might help to restore an incomplete tablet; he and his assistants made a number of joins, but the task of searching for further joins has been made immeasurably more difficult by the failure to record the precise find-spot of each piece, and its subsequent dispersal. Progress, however, is still possible, as this article will show; and there doubtless remain many more joins which can be made when the complete material has been surveyed and analysed. This will perhaps excuse the space devoted here to publishing small scraps of no intrinsic interest or importance, but which may one day be a clue to further discoveries.

In the course of a survey of the Dema Wall in Attica, an isolated house of classical date was found situated immediately in front of a vulnerable section of the fortification. The question of the relation of this site to the wall and the interest of the building itself as a fifth-century B.C. house type demanded closer examination of it. This article sets out the results of its preliminary cleaning in 1958 and its complete excavation in 1960. For convenience the site is referred to as the Dema house.

This catalogue is offered as a tribute to the great British epigraphist to whom this volume is dedicated. Since it consists chiefly of inscribed bases which have lost their sculpture, it may serve as a kind of appendix to studies of archaic Attic funeral monuments, in particular to the two monumental works by Dr. G. M. A. Richter, Kouroi and Archaic Attic Gravestones. I have listed the inscriptions, where possible, under the area of Attica whence each is known, or thought, to have come, and added brief lists of any archaic sculpture which is certainly or possibly (a) from these areas and (b) funerary. Obviously, many inclusions in both lists may be wrong. Stones stray as far as cats or pigeons do, and have no homing instincts. Some of the sculptures listed may have been dedications. But it seemed advisable to risk including the unlawful rather than excluding the lawful, provided that the uncertainties were made clear. Even after one has allowed for all the probabilities of error, the statistics produced from these combined lists yield some general conclusions that are not without interest. They are discussed at the end of the lists.

This entry in the Catalogue comes immediately after the Rhodian contingent under Tlepolemos, and immediately before Achilles' Myrmidons. None of the three leaders appears elsewhere, nor are any of their relatives mentioned elsewhere, with the exception, of course, of Herakles, grandfather of Pheidippos and Antiphos. Of the islands over which they rule, only Kos is mentioned again.

There can be no reason to doubt the identification of Syme, Nisyros, Krapathos, and Kasos, with the islands which still bear those names, apart from a slight and normal change in the case of Krapathos—Karpathos. By Κῶς Εὐρυπύλοιο πόλις is presumably meant a city on the site of the present Kos-town, called elsewhere Μερόπις. Thus the Delian Hymn to Apollo refers to Kos as πόλις Μερόπων ἀνθρώπων. This is borne out by the other references to Kos in the Iliad, for there it is given the epithet εὖ ναιομένην, which elsewhere seems to be applied to cities.

The problem of what Homer meant by νῆσοι Καλύδναι was already being discussed in Strabo's time. He says that the general opinion (φασί) was that νῆσοι Καλύδναι meant Kalymna and the islands near by, Kalymna perhaps being once called Καλύδνα, but that some said that Leros and Kalymna were meant, while Demetrios of Skepsis held that Καλύδναι was a plural similar to Ἀθῆναι or Θῆβαι. While there does not seem to be any good evidence that Kalymna (= Kalymnos) was alone ever called Καλύδνα or Καλύδναι, there is no doubt that the people of Kalymna and the adjacent islands—presumably Telendos and Pserimos, and possibly also Kalolimnos—were called Καλύδνιοι in the fifth century B.C.

At Madutos, once in the Church of St. Constantine, now built into the wall of the house of Salik Yavaş 37, Arif Hikmet Caddesi, Kemalpaşa Mahallesi, Eceabat. Squared but incomplete, creamy stone. Height *0·4 m., breadth *0·55, thickness unascertainable; letter and space down 0·027 in line 1, 0·061 for the rest; letter and space across 0·32.

For the use of ἀγαθῆι τύχηι in Thracian inscriptions there are references in Dumont–Homolle. The letters in line 2 may come from εἰμί and τίτλος, but it seems unlikely, or they may be some expression with ἐπι-. The letters in the third line are probably not from a name, but possibly from Αγοραν̣[ομησας] or αγοραν̣[ομος] may be the next word, though the last letter is more likely to have been iota or sigma than nu.

The dedicatory phrase ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων ποιήσας ἀνέστησεν occurs in, for instance, Traiana Augusta in A.D. 187. There seem to be no parallels in the vicinity for the name Lakunios or Lakunis. There is a similar inscription from Madutos in BCH 1912, 307.

The Hellenistic and Roman city of Knossos occupied a broad plateau extending northward of the Minoan Palace towards the sea. For nearly a mile from the Palace the fields are studded with the debris of occupation. One of the great Roman town houses was partly excavated before the War by Mr. R. W. Hutchinson and the work has been continued by Mr. and Mrs. Michael Gough, now of the British Institute in Ankara. A splendid series of second- to third-century mosaics has been discovered depicting the Dionysiac cult. The city, however, had a Christian community at least as early as about A.D. 170, for in that period Eusebius records the name of a Bishop Pinytus, who earned a reputation for being a zealous moral reformer, and was regarded as an influential figure among correspondents of Bishop Dionysius of Corinth. In the Patristic period Knossos continued to be an important Christian centre, its bishop being present at the Councils of Ephesus, 431, Chalcedon, 451, and Nicaea, 787. The see of Knossos is also mentioned in lists of sees drawn up in the reign of Justinian, and in the eighth century. Between 731 and 787 it seems to have ranked as Protothronos, or second senior bishop. On the Bulgarian episcopal list of 980 Knossos is still recorded among the Cretan bishoprics.

To judge from examples known from North Africa, such as Timgad, Djemila, and Tipasa, the main early Christian centre was likely to be outside the city walls where the cemeteries were located. There would be found the Christian area, and there, too, the earliest centre of worship. At Knossos it seems that a small stream which used to run in an east-westerly direction from the area of Fortetsa, until its course was altered to one slightly farther south when the new hospital was built, marked the boundary between the city and cemetery area.