In 1992–93 excavations were conducted in central Knossos, among the Minoan houses south-west of the Palace. This article describes the unexpectedly large amount of post-Minoan occupation there, casting new light on the extent to which the Hellenic town encroached upon the allegedly deserted Palace area. One Minoan house, much ruined, proved to have been reoccupied in the tenth century BC and again in the seventh. Nearby, a well-preserved pottery kiln of the early seventh century was discovered, and also a paved road of the fifth century which apparently ran across the ruins of the Minoan houses.

The pottery and other finds are presented in fourteen stratified deposits, mainly of the Early Protogeometric, Early Orientalizing, Late Archaic, and Classical periods. These are supplemented by important unpublished pieces from Evans's soundings in the immediate neighbourhood, confirming the extensive seventh-century reoccupation of the site.

A programme, combining a physical survey, intensive pick-up and geophysics, was carried out over 17 ha around the site of a small late Roman fortification, some 6 km south of ancient Pydna. Although the area is intensively farmed, the pick-up survey proved remarkably successful. Hellenistic occupation was identified and a restricted Roman settlement around the site of the quadriburgium. Surprisingly, a new and large late Roman fortification (c. 3–4 ha), equipped with towers, with a densely occupied interior and ‘extramural’ buildings was also found. The north-eastern curtain was discovered by resistivity surveying, the line of the north-western and south-western sides by intensive survey. Pottery and brick monograms from the new site suggests that it dates to the second half of the sixth or possibly early seventh century. It is argued that the quadriburgium may be the site of ancient Anamon, a station on the coastal road from Thessaloniki to Dion. The newly discovered site, clearly of considerable importance, lay on the north bank of the river Sourvala and probably had direct access to the sea, importing both local pottery and amphorae from the eastern Aegean. Its role may have been to protect the fertile coastline of the Pieria and to provide a secure base for the export of agricultural products to the beleaguered cities and settlements around the Thermaic Gulf.

The years 1289–1313 witnessed particularly prolific minting activities at different southern and central Greek mints on behalf of different polities. The coin issues are of great economic and political relevance, and therefore of interest to modern historians. Our understanding of these is based on traditional sources, either numismatic (types and finds), or historical. This paper aims to investigate the possibilities of adding further details to the picture through archaeometry. Specifically, tournois pennies of the three main mints of the region (Clarentza, Thebes, Naupaktos) excavated at Ancient Corinth were analysed according to two different non-destructive methods, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). The resulting relative silver percentages and the fingerprints of the trace elements have supported our attempts to put the different coin types in chronological order and to add detail to the context and intent for each one of these. A vivid picture of monetary production emerges. The different issuing authorities were usually intent on maintaining a decent standard while variously trying to put pressure on rivals or to harmonise their productions with their allies. All the analysed mints were commercial in character, though they were subject to the great political changes affecting Greece in this period, the ambitions of the Angevin dynasty, the various challenges which it faced in Athens, the Peloponnese and the western Mainland, and finally the destructive arrival of the Catalans. In times of need, specifically military, these same mints could therefore rely on further bullion which reached them through internal or external political channels.

The site of Old Smyrna lies on a low spur at the foot of the Yamanlar Daği, or Mountain of Unco Things, at a distance of 450 metres east of the present coastline. The spur is 365 metres long on a north-south axis, with a maximum breadth of 250 metres. On the north-east and east its outline is marked by a bank, revetted in large part by a high terrace wall of small stones. The elevated north-west corner of the site is encircled by superimposed terraces leading up to a circular platform or belvedere, which dominates the site, at an altitude of 21·3 m. above sea-level (Plates 2c, 6a, Squares G–Hix). On the west side the spur is bounded by a cart road leading inland to Bornova, and at the south tip it merges into the low-lying pasturage by a sluggish stream. The terracing of the hillock, which in the north-west presents a picturesque aspect, is believed in the main to be the work of a landowner named Turlita in the nineteenth century. A zone along the north side of the site, corresponding in width to the main sector of our excavations there, is planted with olive trees, of which we were obliged to cut down a score; there is also a narrow fringe of olives along the eastern edge of the site. The greater part of the surface of the hillock is divided between two vineyards, the upper on the north and the lower on the south, separated by a bank which is bordered near its east end by a row of fig trees (Squares Nxvi to Gxix); there is also a smaller vineyard of triangular outline on the slope between the upper vineyard and the Bornova road.

This group of tombs lies about 50 metres south-west of the main Knossos–Herakleion road, immediately opposite the new Sanatorium. Here in the autumn of 1953 Mr. David Smollett, then engaged in making the map for the Knossos Survey, noticed some large sherds which had been thrown into a rubbish pit on the edge of a small patch of ground newly ploughed for a vineyard (Plan, Fig. 1, a). The vineyard lay on the top of a slight knoll behind the café on the west side of the road. The knoll had until this time been occupied by a threshing floor, and was pointed out by the local inhabitants as the site of the ‘Tomb of Caiaphas’. But the great Roman concrete-built tomb traditionally known as the ‘Tomb of Caiaphas’, was really, it appears, on the main road some metres away to the north-west (Knossos Survey 23): it was destroyed about 1880 when the road was built.

The sherds recovered by Mr. Smollett, some of them large and freshly broken from fine Geometric vases, made it seem likely that there was a disturbed tomb of that period in the area. Permission was therefore sought, and readily granted by Dr. N. Platon, Ephor of Antiquities for Crete, to explore the field before it was planted with vines. Trials led to the discovery of three small collapsed chamber tombs, all apparently Iron Age in date, cut in the soft kouskouras rock. The tombs clearly belong to the same complex as tombs L, Π, and TFT which have been published by Brock in Fortetsa (1957). They stood in a row with their entrances facing south towards Knossos. Two isolated burials (Plan, Fig. 1, b, c), extended on their backs with their heads to the west and feet to the east immediately below the surface of the field, may be Roman or later; there was a bent iron nail by the left hand of burial c. The knoll with the tombs lies near the western edge of the big Roman cemetery which covered the region now occupied by the new Sanatorium (Knossos Survey 35).

In the small collection of Greek vases in Reading University there is a pyxis, complete with lid, and also an odd lid from a similar pyxis (Pl. 6, 1 and 3), with floral decoration of the kind that prevailed in Boeotia in the latter part of the fifth century. The painting is done with care, and both vase and lid have an elegance that contrasts with the rusticity of most vases with this sort of decoration.

In shape and size the Reading vase corresponds with the well-known pyxis formerly in the Branteghem collection (Froehner Coll. Van Branteghem no. 211 PL. 46). The height of the Reading pyxis is 0·205 m., of the Branteghem pyxis 0·21 m. Its lid is flat, with an upward curve at the rim, the knob pagoda-like with six tiers, the foot in three sections, unpainted and ribbed horizontally.

The pottery described comes from areas of the Roman stoa that were selected by the excavators as important. Most groups contained quantities of local tiles, glazed or unglazed, and large numbers of unidentifiable body sherds. The vast majority of the pottery was locally made and is micaceous, normally very micaceous. Its normal colour is orange of various shades, but it can be a light brown; fired in a reducing atmosphere the body is grey, and this can have a grey slip. There was considerable use of black glaze and red-to-brown slip on Laconian vessels, both coarse and fine; black glaze seems to have been in use at Sparta well into the 1st cent. AD. The generally late hellenistic and Roman Laconian vessels from these contexts are largely unknown archaeologically, and dating is thus at a preliminary stage. Very few imports were found, but these represent the main dating criteria. The hellenistic and Roman pottery found in the Roman stoa, limited as it is, can only be regarded as material for the beginning of a corpus of the many local forms of the period.

The prehistoric site of Thermi lies 10 km. north of Mytilene, nearly 2 km. east of the modern village, and about half a kilometre south-east of the hot springs which give the district its name. Before excavation it appeared as a low mound on the coast, part of which had been cut away by the sea. The cliff face rises to 6·20 m. at the highest part of the mound: the relation of virgin soil to the settlement earth is shewn in the sections, Pl. II. Scattered stones, obviously once used for building, extend for 30 m. out to sea: it seems probable that at least 15–20 m. of the city have been lost on this side owing to the gradual erosion of the coast. The extent of the surviving parts can be roughly estimated from the map, Pl. I, though not all the boundaries have yet been discovered.

Two mosques in Galata—the Mosque of the Arabs (Arab Djami) and the Mosque of the Leaded Store (Kurshunlu Maghzen Djamisi)—lay claim to be the earliest buildings consecrated to Moslem worship in Constantinople. Both are supposed to date from the period of the Arab sieges, many centuries before the Ottoman conquest. Their traditional claim to this honourable pedigree is of some antiquity. Evliya Effendi, in the middle of the seventeenth century, already attributes an Arab origin to four buildings in Galata, of which two are the mosques in question and the others a lead-roofed granary (Kurshunlu Maghzen), still used as such in his time, and the famous Galata Tower. All these, and in addition the Rose Mosque (Gul-Djami) in Stamboul, are supposed to have been built during the famous siege of Constantinople by the Arabs under Maslama.

These tantalizing fragments of an Assessment List present two unusual features. First the figures stand to the right of the names and are divided from them by two-point punctuation. This recalls the practice of the first Quota List. All later Quota Lists and the Assessments of 425 and 422 B.C. have the figures before the names and punctuation of any sort is extremely rare. Secondly there are several ionicisms in the script: two etas in col. iii. 3 and 5 and an Ionic lambda in the latter line. Meritt argued from the physical evidence of the stone that the Island column stood first. The order of districts was presumably Islands, Ionia, Hellespont and Thrace—which seems to have been invariable from 425 B.C.—and the ATL editors accordingly disposed the Hellespontine names in col. iii and placed some probable Ionic names in col. ii. Otherwise they attempted no restoration. Perhaps they were deterred by finding one new name among the very few preserved. Some speculation, however, about the Ionic panel seems legitimate.

The letters -ΕΝΙ- (line 7) could be part of Κλαӡομένιοι, Θερμαῑοι ἐν ʾΙκάρῳ, or Οἰναῑοι ἐν ʾΙκάρῳ as Meritt rightly observed. But what can be made of the remnants—ΚΟ!!!—in line 4? At first sight they baffle conjecture. The last stroke is preserved only at the base and Meritt noted that it might form a letter with the preceding upright.

The resemblance of certain of the ivories to some in the Ephesus deposit makes it clear that they came from Asia. Close relations and exchange of gifts between Sparta and Lydia are recorded for the sixth century, and have been claimed for the seventh, the age of Alcman. Long ago Curtius pointed out certain affinities between the Lydian goddess of the Lake, Artemis Gygaea, and the Spartan Orthia. Now that Mr. Hogarth has vindicated the Hellenic character of the early worship of Artemis at Ephesus, it becomes probable that the great Ionian sanctuary may have made its influence felt at Sparta as well as at Koloene. The road to Sardis was by Ephesus, and the road to Ephesus by Samos, and with Samos too we have links. The legend of the xoanon found in a thicket of agnus castus is common to the cult of Hera at Samos and of Orthia at Sparta. Again the best parallels for the Spartan masks have been found, as Mr. Dawkins has pointed out, in Samian tombs.

It has been and still is widely supposed that some Greek kilns had a stoking tunnel that was divided lengthwise into two parts. The evidence is the representation of a kiln on the Corinthian clay plaque illustrated on Plate 7b. It is of the second quarter of the sixth century B.C. and was found in 1879 in the deposit at Penteskouphia near Corinth. This representation is interpreted usually as a horizontal plan; at one end, misplaced for clarity, is the chimney, which should rightly be on the top, and at the other end is the stoking tunnel, divided down its length by a wall. Recently M. Bimson has protested that the view on the plaque is a vertical section across the chamber of the kiln, and that the support below the floor is a wall that does not extend into the tunnel. That the plaque gives a section is true, but it is a section along the kiln and the support is a pier, probably circular. This was presumably so evident to Furtwängler, who first published the plaque, that he did not argue the interpretation; but it seems that after all argument is needed.

Many of the plaques from Penteskouphia are decorated on both sides and ours is one of them. The side opposite that with the kiln is illustrated on Plate 7a. It shows a man and the hind part of a boar. Since the right edge is broken and it is very rarely that any of these plaques shows an incomplete figure, it can be calculated that we have less than half of the original scene. The same must be true also of the side with the kiln and, since very few of the plaques combine two scenes on one side, there must be a considerable extension of this scene to the left. An examination of the other published plaques with kilns leaves little doubt of what that extension was. The regular view of a kiln is from the side, usually an elevation, but in two instances a partial section (Plate 7c–d). Often there is a workman busy at the stoke-hole or the chimney. In the two sectional views just mentioned faggots can be seen in the stoking tunnel and embers or other small pieces are spilling into the near part of the lower chamber.

When I wrote my report on the excavation of Polis, Ithaca, the leader of the expedition had suggested that in Ithaca, Early Bronze Age pottery had persisted till the closing phases of the Late Bronze Age, which meant that Ithaca was a backward little place well away from the broad stream of contemporary culture. I thought it possible that there was another lag after the Late Bronze Age, and I called certain vases ‘Mycenaean,’ taking fabric to be the determining factor. My paper was written in 1932, but not published till 1942, and long before then I was sure that we were both wrong. Mr. Heurtley wished to account for the presence of fifty Mycenaean sherds in an Early Bronze Age Settlement at Pilikata. It is true that no Middle Bronze Age settlement has yet been found in Ithaca. That may be our bad fortune, or the island may have been uninhabited in the centuries before 1500 B.C., as it was in the sixteenth century A.D. It seems simpler to admit disturbance by any later diggers of foundations or seekers of wells, than to postulate an iron curtain between Ithaca and both its nearest neighbours, Kephallenia and Leukas, in the Middle Bronze Age. After all, Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age sherds were found together in Area VI at Pilikata, and no house plans have resulted; some disturbance seems inevitable.

The museums in Agrinion and Ioannina possess a number of small squat-lekythoi, decorated usually with a single figure flanked by spiral tendrils, which may be seen to form a group. To this nucleus other examples may be added from the Balkans, Italy, and Switzerland. These are all minor vases, but they are of some interest if, as seems possible, they represent a local fabric from north-west Greece.

The course of the Roman road along the southern shore of the sea of Marmora between Priapus and Cyzicus has hitherto been known only from the Peutinger table and from a single milestone (the thirteenth) found in a Turkish cemetery above Tchaoush-keui, not far therefore from its original position. The Peutinger table notes only one point between the places named—the crossing of the Granicus. That of the Aesepus, a much more important river, is still marked by the considerable remains of a fine Roman bridge, which, owing to its secluded position at a turn of the valley, has hitherto escaped the notice of such travellers as have passed along the coast road. Hearing at Boghashehr, where I had shewn an interest in the fast-vanishing ruin of Ak-kupru, that a similar bridge existed on the road to Gunen, I took that route and was rewarded by the discovery of the best-preserved ancient bridge in the district.

If we summarize the ethnological evidence from excavation set forth in the previous paper it is to the following effect:—Notwithstanding all the local deviations that appear on the surface, there is no essential distinction of race underlying the civilization reflected by the remains at Tiryns and Mycenae, and that in Crete in the latter part of the Late Minoan Age. This period is represented by the remains of partial occupation of the royal buildings and by the finds from the cemeteries of the same period at Knossos, Phaestos and elsewhere in Crete. On contemplation of the finds belonging to this period, nothing is more striking than the uniform fact that there is in the regular sequence of development no real break as yet with what preceded.

In my previous paper on Cretan Palaces and the Aegean Civilization I sought to give a general account of the architectural evidence resulting from excavation, in its bearing on the disputed question as to the continuity of Aegean culture throughout the course of its development.

It will now be advisable to consider the problems involved on a wider basis, in the light of the objects other than architectural, found in Crete and elsewhere in the Aegean world.

The Carian Hypothesis as to the Origins of the Aegean Civilization.

That the implications of the question are of an ethnological character will at this stage in the inquiry be generally admitted. And here it will be convenient to take as our point of departure a standpoint that may now perhaps be regarded as pretty general, though negative in its bearings, and which is to the effect that the originators of the Aegean civilization, at any rate in its pre-Mycenaean phases, were not ‘Achaeans’ in the vague general sense of being a people from the mainland of Greece. But the attempt to give a positive form to this conclusion has led to the revival of an old hypothesis which is perhaps not so entirely out of date as has lately been supposed. According to this hypothesis, the originators and representatives of the Aegean civilization were Carians from southwest Anatolia, and it was they, according to Doerpfeld, who built the earlier palaces of Crete. The later Cretan palaces, on the other hand, according to the same authority, were built by people of Achaean, and so of Hellenic race.

The village of Molyvdoskepastos stands on the north-eastern slopes of Mount Nemerçka (Merope) on the present Greek–Albanian frontier, above the valley where the Voiussa river is joined by the tributary of Sarandaporos, in the district of Pogoniani. The 19th-century travellers in Epirus and Albania seem to have passed it by as unworthy of their attentions, although the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes (writing in 1820) remarks not only on the number of its churches ‘which appear to have been ruined and deserted for some centuries’, but also on the unparalleled incivility of its inhabitants. The character and hospitality of the villagers, despite their recent privations, appears to have improved in proportion to the steady deterioration of their homes and their ancient monuments.

The village was formerly called Dipalitsa, but its present name is derived from the monastery of the Dormition of the Virgin, situated in the valley below close by a small tributary of the Voiussa river, and it was through the influence of this monastery that the village attained its importance as the seat of the archbishopric of Pogoniani. The foundation of the monastery and the establishment of the archbishopric are associated with the name of the Emperor Constantine IV Pogonatos (A.D. 668–85), and the tradition is borne out by documentary evidence which may or may not have been invented to supplement the deficiencies of the historians. The name Pogoniani, if a Slav derivation be discounted, is easily linked with the title Pogonatos: and it is supposed that the Emperor stayed in the district when returning by an overland route to Constantinople after his defeat of the usurper Mizizios in Sicily in 668.

The vases to be discussed in this paper come from two separate excavations at Knossos: the greater number from two tombs excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in 1907, the rest from one of several tombs which I excavated three years ago. The three tombs in question lie a little less than a mile to the north of the Palace, at the foot of the western slope of the hill known as Zafer Papoura (cf. Fig. 1); they are cut into a low bank, immediately to the right of the footpath as one goes from Makry Teichos to Isopata, and are marked in Fig. 1 by a black bar. A glance at the map will shew that this group of tombs is in the same straight line as the group which was excavated by Hogarth in 1899. Hogarth's tombs are at the foot of a rather higher bank which is obviously part of the same formation. There is, however, a break between the two banks, and as the greater part of it is covered by a vineyard it is impossible to tell precisely how closely the two groups of tombs are connected. But even if there is an empty space between them, it is certain the history of the two groups of tombs is the same.

The plains of Pyrgi, Kalamoti, and Dotia, in the south-east corner of Chios, form a single geographic unit, bounded in the east by the hills which run inland from the promontory of Agridia, in the west by the low range of Kampia, Aradhopetra, and Kakopetria, and in the north by the more formidable barrier of the central mountains of the island. In them there are traces of several ancient sites, at Pindakas, Dotia, and elsewhere, but these appear to have been little more than isolated farmhouses or small sanctuaries and it is almost certain that most of the inscriptions from the area came originally from the major sites at Emporio and Phanai. From these they have been transported, some as far as Chios town, most to other local sites, to country churches or to the medieval towns of Pyrgi and Kalamoti. In many cases it is now impossible to trace their origin (even those which have reached the comparative safety of the Museum are often without record of their provenance), and it would therefore be pointless to try to isolate the inscriptions of any one ancient centre. For this reason I have collected here, in addition to the few inscriptions discovered in the British School excavations at Emporio, all the other material known to have been found in the area. For convenience I reproduce all but the most accessible texts in full. Generally it has been possible to check earlier readings on the stone (in which case the text is my own without any note of alterations unless they are significant); those which I have not seen are marked with an asterisk.