Alfred Biliotti, British vice-consul at Trebizond, spent nine days at Satala in 1874. He is well known as an enquiring and meticulous observer. The account of his visit, in a consular paper in the British Museum, remains by far the best description of the legionary fortress, and holds several items of particular interest.

Biliotti was able to record at leisure structural remains in an altogether better state of preservation than is true today. His 18 ft walls, with traces of ashlar facing, are now reduced to rubble cores visible, except at the north-east and south-east angles, only in eroded sections (Figs. 1, 2). Of the square projecting towers there is now barely a trace. The supposed look-out towers reported on the surrounding mountain tops are known from no other source.

His are the only excavations on record in Armenia Minor, and at any point on the limes itself between Trapezus and the rescue work north of the Keban dam.

His account is a valuable source for social conditions in the villages during the late Ottoman period. The way of life at Satala depended on techniques that can have changed little since Roman times, and survived virtually unaltered until the introduction of tractors in the later 1960s.

Since the hurried journey of Hogarth and Yorke in 1894, the Euphrates limes has remained virtually unexplored, and uncertainty has continued to surround its geography and organization.

The basic structure, established under Vespasian and consolidated by Hadrian, and many of the details of its course, can now be located on the ground. Three legionary fortresses—at Satala (Plate IV, 1), Melitene and Samosata, with legionary vexillations (replaced under Diocletian by a new legion) at a fourth at Trapezus—blocked the major strategic routes from the east, and are already well known. They were linked by an eight metre military road, whose remains I have managed to trace on foot, almost without a break, for a hundred miles north of Melitene, along the right bank of the Euphrates: barely a fifth of the total distance from the Black Sea to the southern foothills of the Kurdish Taurus. A series of auxiliary forts seems to have stood on, or at points east of, the road at intervals of a day's march. Most of the sites hitherto proposed—by armchair inspection of inaccurate maps—should be dismissed, but genuine sites have proved elusive. Only at Dascusa has excavation been possible, to reveal fourth-century work, rather than the original fort. But an important inscription in re-use attests military activity under Titus or Domitian: along with the Pompeius Collega milestone, it provides confirmation of scattered literary and numismatic evidence for Vespasian's hand in the building of the frontier.

In June 1961 the writers gave three weeks to exploring the country in the neighbourhood of Alânya, the ancient Coracesium, and Gazipaşa, formerly Selinti, the ancient Selinus. This region proved to be rewarding; and we hope to pursue our investigations both there and to the east of Anamur in future years—the more so since our predecessors have been few and often hampered by the difficulties of the terrain. Some indeed, like Beaufort, travelled almost exclusively by sea; others found themselves detained by the archaeological richness of the Olba–Lamos area, and then, like Sterrett and Theodore Bent, diverted up the Calycadnus gorge into the hinterland of Isauria. Explorers of the coastlands between Manavgat and Silifke are in effect reduced to Heberdey and Wilhelm (quoted hereafter as HW) in 1892, Paribeni and Romanelli in 1913, Wilhelm and Keil in 1914. To those familiar with this country it is revealing to learn that Wilhelm's visits—for example to Sinekkalesi and Syedra, extensive sites, heavily scrub-covered—were often brief affairs; that his exploration of Seleucia above Side and indeed of all the coast lying immediately to the east of the Melas river was cut short by repeated thunder-storms.

The ruins of Old Paphos are now occupied by the village of Kouklia, some 10 miles to the south-south-east of (New) Paphos which lies below Ktima in western Cyprus. Since Old Paphos capital of an ancient city-kingdom, was alike the ecumenical centre of Aphrodite-worship and the ἰερόν of New Paphos, capital of Cyprus for the Ptolemies seemingly from the outset of the second century B.C., its Hellenistic inscriptions are relatively abundant. These I first examined in 1936. I have since then repeatedly revisited the site, to add to the unpublished and to rediscover others long lost. Finally, from 1950 to 1955 excavations were conducted in the area of the Aphrodite temple and in the outskirts of Kouklia, to make a notable enlargement of the total. Here into a handlist of the known inscriptions I incorporate the formal publication of the new material and, wherever this may call for fuller treatment, a greater emphasis on the old.

It will be seen from the preceding classification of the documents that there is numerically remarkable disproportion between their classes. Whereas the hard local limestones used for the statue-bases could be employed repeatedly as building material, the dice have been heavily weighted against the survival of the fine, white marbles: two lime-kilns which in 1888 were still squatting on the temple site explain the rarity of these.

The British Museum has long been in possession of a limestone stele from the Cypriot village of Salamniou, some 12 miles north-east of Kouklia (Old Paphos). It has been published—save in one particular—very adequately (B.M. Catalogue of Sculpture no. 430). It is excellently illustrated by the photograph here reproduced (for which I am indebted to the kindness of Professor Ashmole); and I can usefully comment only upon the inscription which fills somewhat chaotically the pediment above the naked archer. The Catalogue is content to reproduce for this inscription a text of Deecke (SGDI 41) over which we need waste no time whatsoever: as Deecke himself very soon saw (Bezz. Beitr. xi 317 f.), he had read it backwards, not in the characteristic direction of the fifth and fourth century Paphian signary, but from right to left.

My friend Mr. M. R. Popham, of the Government of Cyprus, was kind enough to inform me in a letter dated 9th July, 1959, of his discovery in the village of Nikoklia, some 2 km. to the north of Kouklia, site of the ancient Palaipaphos, of this important inscription.

A slab of fine white marble, 0·545 m. high, 0·605 m. wide, and 0·08 m. thick (pl. x), found during the spring of 1959 in the renovation of a floor of the village church and removed on 3rd May to the Epigraphic Museum at Kouklia: undoubtedly transported from the famous site of the Aphrodite temple of Palaipaphos, the source of so many inscriptions alike of Ptolemaic and of Roman date, it has thus now been restored approximately to the place from which it came. The stone preserves original surfaces above, to right and left, but below it is broken away.

It was not my original intention to devote a special study to the Helenos who governed Cyprus for the Ptolemies (as I believe) during the last two decades of the second century B.C. I stated my views about him briefly in 1937, 1940 and again in 1953; and, although these views have not been well received, I was content to let the matter rest at that. However, no sooner had I made this last pronouncement than we found on the site of the Aphrodite temple at Old Paphos two new dedications of Helenos himself (our nos. 1 and 4 below); while in 1954 yet another inscription in his honour came to light at Salamis (no. 6). These compel me not merely to ascribe to Helenos both a text which I have wrongly restored (no. 3) and one, likewise from Old Paphos, by which for many years I have been baffled (no. 2), but in general to modify the opinions which I held about him. It seems proper, therefore, that I should assemble all the evidence that I know, and on my analysis of this venture what I trust may be my final reconstruction of the career of Helenos. Some fresh light will be thrown in the process upon the institutions and the history of Cyprus for the eight years which precede and the twelve which follow the death of Euergetes II in 116 B.C. But I freely admit that much of the new evidence is difficult and ambiguous; and for this present study my chief claim is that it sets out facts which others also may interpret.

Mr. K. Nikolaou, a native of the κωμόπολις of Rizokárpaso in the north-eastern extremity of Cyprus and student of archaeology in the University of London, in a letter dated April 12th, 1956, reports the discovery of an interesting inscription. ‘The stone’, he writes, ‘was brought to my notice just before this last Christmas. I visited the place, about 200 m. south-west of the Church of Ag. Phílon, and having dug all round, I noticed the inscription on top. . . .’ This church, some two miles north of Rizokárpaso, marks the centre of the site of the ancient Karpasia. Of the inscription we offer together the following account, Mr. Nikolaou contributing photographs, squeeze, hand-copy and description of the stone.

In June and July 1950 a trial excavation of four weeks' duration was carried out at the site of Old Paphos (Palaepaphos) in Cyprus, a city renowned for its Temple of Aphrodite, erected, it was said, to commemorate her legendary birth off-shore from the foam of the sea, and her landing there. The site is occupied today by the small village of Kouklia, and lies on a bluff of soft limestone dropping steeply to a coastal plain which here narrows to the width of something like a mile. It is situated in the south-west of Cyprus, nine miles to the south-east of Ktima (map reference 3217 on sheet 2 of the 1/50,000 Map of Cyprus).

The late Sir George Hill in the first volume of his monumental History of Cyprus remarks that the Cypriot syllabary is found in use until the third century B.C. This, it may be noted, is the traditional opinion which for some sixty years has stood the test of time. I read therefore with interest on p. 330 of the same volume, among the addenda, that ‘pottery with incised inscriptions, discovered in 1939 in an excavation four miles from Nicosia, shows that the syllabary continued to be used as late as the first century B.C.’ Sir George Hill in effect is here accepting the claim of Mrs. E. H. Dohan and Professor R. G. Kent, which he has hitherto ignored, that the syllabary survived until 50 B.C. Now this is an important claim, partly because it would add from two to three centuries to the life-span of a script already in possession of a long and reputable lineage; more particularly because, if true, it will convict the ancient Cypriot, admittedly a conservative individual, of a degree of conservatism with which I find it hard to credit even him. That there should still have been men in the hinterland of the island under the governorship of Cicero so little affected by the impact of the whole Hellenistic age that they were prepared to write Greek in a manner so uncouth and preserve, incidentally, certain elements of their old Arcadian tongue, is to my thinking highly improbable. A fresh examination of the evidence on which Mrs. Dohan and Professor Kent based their claim is clearly called for.

In their preface to Vol. X of the Cambridge Ancient History the editors promise that in Vol. XI will be found a ‘survey of the several provinces during the two centuries that end with the Antonines.’ The student of Roman Cyprus cannot be advised to turn to this volume, because he will there find no mention of Cyprus whatsoever, even as a word in the index. This neglect—for such, indeed, it seems—is indicative not only of the quite literal insularity of this small and in general insignificant province, but also of a long-standing and unwarranted indifference to Cypriot epigraphy. Since the profitable visit of Waddington in 1862, few epigraphists have landed in Cyprus with any higher purpose than the enjoyment of a busman's holiday; and whereas prehistory, archaeology, sculpture, coinage and the literary sources have been the subject of specialised study, the historian of Cyprus under the Empire, when he takes up the only available collection of inscriptions for his period, that still indispensable work Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, finds there sixty-nine inscriptions only, of which several have been poorly published and some again imperfectly edited.