Archaeological excavations were conducted at Alişar Höyük in central Turkey from 1927 to 1932 by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The six years of investigation uncovered evidence that indicated the mound had been occupied intermittently from at least the Early Bronze Age through the modern Turkish period. The premature cessation of excavations at the site, however, left many issues unresolved, a situation that has bedeviled Anatolian specialists up to the present day.

Foremost among the problems left unsettled by the Oriental Institute excavations was the question of whether a Late Bronze II settlement (1400–1200 B.C.) had existed at the site, an issue that was raised by the discovery at Alişar of cuneiform tablets written in the Old Assyrian script that referred to a town called Amkuwa, known also from Hittite texts as Ankuwa. On the basis of these references, scholars were quick to associate Amkuwa/Ankuwa with Alişar. The problem with this equation is that, on the one hand, a Hittite text dating to the reign of Hittite king Ḫattušili III makes it clear that Ankuwa was occupied in the LB II.

After the completion of the new Museum in Gaziantep, the then Director, Bay Hasan Candemir, asked the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara to undertake the task of refurbishing and rearranging the material (in the Gaziantep Museum) from the 1949 excavations. It was not until 1986 that the B.I.A.A. was able to organize a team suitable for the work of restoration and refurbishment. Since 1986 two further seasons have been completed in the Museum of Gaziantep: Spring 1987 and Spring 1988. The report here is based on the activities of Spring 1986 and Spring 1987.

The original work at Sakçagözü was, of course, carried out by Professor John Garstang who in 1908 and again in 1911 excavated on the site still called locally Coba Höyük (“mound A”). His aim was to reveal the Iron Age relief sculptures which had been discovered there. During the course of excavation he encountered pottery and other remains which were clearly earlier than the period represented by the sculptures.

Professor Garstang also excavated at Songrus Höyük (“mound B”) and took the opportunity to make trial excavations at Keferdiz Höyük (“mound C”).

Volume XXII of Anatolian Studies which was dedicated to Prof. S. Lloyd contains (in pp. 87–114) a detailed study by J. D. Hawkins of the Hittite hieroglyphic monumental inscriptions and stone monuments from the area of the Lower Palace in Carchemish. It seems needless to stress the importance of this study which presents a reliable and up to date reading of the inscriptions. The data gathered from them can now be better used in attempts to solve the complex problems of the chronology and arrangement of the associated monuments. This was done by Hawkins who on the basis of the inscriptional evidence came to various conclusions concerning the monuments of the Long Wall of Sculpture and the Great Staircase. Some of his conclusions form the subject of this rejoinder.

Leon de Laborde's visit to Alahan in 1826 provided the earliest western account of the monastery complex that is now so closely associated with the work of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara through the excavations conducted by Michael Gough. Laborde was not, however, the first of the modern visitors. He was preceded by the indefatigable Evliya Çelebi, who visited the site in 1671–1672, while on his way to Mecca for the pilgrimage. Evliya followed more or less the course of the modern highway from Karaman to Mut, and I give below the full account of his journey between these two stations. Of the two primary authorities for the text, I have used MS. Pertev Pş 462, f. 68a as my chief source, with supplements from MS. Beşir Aǧa 452, f. 68a (a fuller, but less scrupulous, and on the whole less intelligent copy). The two copies vary more than is normally to be expected. The lost exemplar may have become increasingly unclear in the final two volumes, and the copyists were probably tiring of their monumental task. In the 1935 modernization of Seyahatname, Vol. IX, the passage occurs on pages 315–316.

The building that forms the subject of the present paper was studied by the writer during the course of the 1977 season of survey at Oenoanda. As no excavation was possible under the terms of the expedition's permit, the study was limited to the upstanding walls, visible foundations, and accessible blocks of fallen masonry, with the result that many details of the architecture have had to remain uncertain. A systematic excavation would resolve most of these uncertainties, because there is every reason to believe that the elements for a near-complete restoration, in both plan and elevation, are lying buried on the site. Such an excavation is, however, unlikely to take place in the near future, and, since the range of buildings in Lycia which have been published in any detail remains small, it has seemed worth while to present the results of the 1977 work forthwith. Building Mk 1 is of added importance in that its function can be identified and the date of at least one of its major phases can be established on epigraphic and other grounds: it is certainly a bath-building and equally certainly achieved its final form in the Severan period.

It has long been known that HLuvian sign 383, an oblique stroke (\), when added to another sign, indicates the presence of a postvocalic r: see the references cited by Laroche, HH 205. The “thorn”, as it is often called, may indicate /r/ alone, or a sequence /ra/ or /ri/. The now standard transliteration ra/i is thus a cover symbol for all three possibilities. The actual reading in any particular case may be determined only on comparative grounds, internal or external. As examples of /r/, /ra/, and /ri/1 may cite respectively dat.-loc. pl. (“FINES”)I + ra/i-ha-za = /irhanza/ “boundaries” (cf. Hitt. irḫa- “idem”), pret. 3rd sg. i + ra/i = /ira/ “went”, and pres. 3rd sg. i + ra/i = /iri/ “goes”.

Hawkins, Morpurgo-Davies and Neumann, HHL 171 f, have argued that in internal and final position the combination 209 + 383 (), in addition to i + ra/i, may also indicate ri+i = /ri/. That is, in combination with a vowel sign V, the “thorn” may indicate the sequence /rV/ instead of/Vra/i/. Note that the HLuvian syllabary has no CV sign for /ri/, while sign 412 (and less often sign 103) spells /ru/. Evidence for the reading ri+i comes from alternations such as abl./inst. DEUS-na-ri+i beside deus-na-ti-(i) “by/from the god(s)” or tu-pi-ri+i beside tu-pi-ti-i “strikes”.

An inscription at Comana Cappadociae (Şar köyü, Mağara, Adana), hitherto unpublished, provides the evidence for this note (Pl. XLIIa, Fig. 1). The stone is now in the yard of the school at Şar. It is a white marble slab, 0.90 × 0.40 m., recut below and at the lower right corner. The building which now houses the school was a church when the village was inhabited by Armenians and seems to have been built by them entirely out of ancient materials. This stone is said to have formed the door-sill of the church and to have been taken out when the position of the door was changed recently. Lines 4 and 5 certainly appear to have been worn by the passage of feet.

A small, thin, rectangular limestone plaque, bearing a five-line inscription, was copied by A.H. in the Konya Archaeological Museum in September 1980. The stone lacked an inventory number, and the Museum's staff could supply no information about its provenance. One may presume, however, that it has reached the Museum in recent years, probably after discovery in Konya itself. As will be demonstrated below, other grounds exist for supposing that it comes from Konya, but a provenance elsewhere in the Konya İli cannot be ruled out.

The block is complete to left and right, probably complete above and below, broken behind: H. 0·16, W. 0·32, Th. 0·06, with letters varying between 1·5 and 3 cm. (the smallest on the bottom line) which are irregular in shape and unevenly set out on the stone (see photograph of squeeze, Plate XXVIIa). The face is slightly damaged at its top right-hand corner and at the bottom left.

In AS. XIV, 1964, Michael Ballance published in “Derbe and Faustinopolis” not only the decisive evidence for the identification of Faustinopolis at Başmakçı but also a useful summary of the evidence for the Roman routes leading towards the Cilician Gates. In the same volume I published a prosopographical study of Aradius Paternus, a previously unknown governor of Cappadocia commemorated on a milestone of Severus Alexander (illustrated on Pl. XXIa) found at Soğukpınar, three miles south of the modern town of Pozantı. I present here the results of survey work done in the ilçe of Pozantı, in the summer of 1964, as part of a wider survey of Roman Cappadocia undertaken as Institute Scholar and with the benefit of a survey permit obtained for me by the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, Ankara.

A Babylonian text from Sultantepe published by Professor Gurney in 1964 noted that the age of seventy marked a “long life” though it goes on to list eighty as “old age” (šībūtu) and ninety as “extreme old age” (littūtum). In congratulating my teacher and colleague on his long life of scholarship this contribution carries with it best wishes for his continuing work as ana labīrūti illak. Having been with Professor Seton Lloyd at Sultantepe on the day in 1951 when the site was first surveyed and chosen as full of promise it would seem appropriate to offer here a text which virtually completes the first tablet of the poem of the Righteous Sufferer (ludlul bēl nēmeqi). In 1954 Professor Gurney made available, in conjunction with W. G. Lambert, a new text from Sultantepe which marked a notable advance on our hitherto scanty knowledge of that tablet. Subsequently Professor Lambert published the first part of the hymn of praise to the god Marduk (ll. 1–12) with which this classical poem opens.

The first fragments of the Epicurean inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda were discovered by M. Holleaux and P. Paris one hundred years ago, in December 1884, and it is particularly satisfying to be able to mark the centenary of this significant event by publishing three new fragments of Diogenes' work.

The fragments were discovered by members of a British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara team, which spent two weeks at Oenoanda in the summer of 1983 (17th–31st August) carrying forward the epigraphical and topographical survey of the site begun in 1974–7 and continued in 1981.

The members of the team were A. S. Hall (Director), J. J. Coulton, A. Farrington and R. R. R. Smith. The representative of the Turkish Government was Bay İbrahim Malkoç. A heavy debt of gratitude is owed, and warmly acknowledged, to the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ankara, from which the permit was derived.

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary study of Lydian pottery excavated at Daskyleion between 1988 and 2002. Before becoming the satrapal centre of Hellespontine Phrygia in the Achaemenid period, to judge by the historical and archaeological evidence, Daskyleion had close interrelations with the Lydian kingdom. Previous stylistic and macroscopic fabric studies of Lydian pottery from Daskyleion have shown that as well as items produced in the Lydian capital of Sardis, ceramics may also have been imported from other production centres in the region of Greater Lydia (Gürtekin-Demir 2002). New chemical analysis by neutron activation (NAA) of 31 samples from Daskyleion presented here confirms this suggestion. We determined four chemical provenance groups of Lydian pottery, each of them defined by an element pattern which is distinct from the pottery made in Sardis. Although these four provenance groups cannot be located at present due to the lack of reference data from potential Lydian-style ceramic production centres in Anatolia, they prove that other production centres existed outside Sardis. Daskyleion may have been one of those.

In AS XXXVII (1987) 23–35 J. M. Wagstaff writes interestingly of “Colonel Leake and the Classical Topography of Asia Minor”.

Leake succeeded in identifying a large number of ancient sites in Asia Minor. Dr. Wagstaff is well aware of this and naturally enough does not make it his business to list them all. However, in view of current B.I.A.A. work at Oenoanda and Balbura in the Cibyratis, it seems worth pointing out, as a footnote to his article, that Leake was the first to identify both cities, although he never visited either of them. He identified them on the basis of epigraphical evidence collected in October 1841 by Richard Hoskyn, Master of H.M.S. Beacon, and the naturalist Edward Forbes, and his “Remarks on Mr. Hoskyn's Paper”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society XII (1842) 162–9, may be added to Dr. Wagstaff's list of publications of the man whom Louis Robert justly described as “l'incarnation de la géographie du monde hellénique pendant la première partie du XIXe siècle”.

Since it was my good fortune to begin working in Anatolia while Seton Lloyd was Director of the Ankara Institute, and to enjoy his friendly encouragement for several years, I am glad to have the opportunity of dedicating this article to him.

In June, 1958, the following inscription was discovered by the writer in Yazdamıköy, one of a group of villages near the ancient site of Isaura (Zengibar Kalesi), which is situated on a mountain crest some 10 km. east of Bozkır and the valley of the Çarşamba Çayı. Large quantities of material from the site have been recorded within these villages since Hamilton first visited the area in 1837. There can, therefore, be little doubt about the provenance of this particular block of limestone, slightly moulded at the top, broken bottom left and to right; H. 0·34, W. 0·93, Th. unknown (buried behind), letters 2·5 cm.

In 1995 a new series of multi-disciplinary investigations were initiated by the authors into diachronic human occupation of the coastal plain at Altınova, between Ayvalık and Dikili on the Aegean coast of northwest Turkey (Fig. 1). Altınova lies approximately halfway between the much better-known (and certainly more intensively investigated) archaeological regions of Troy to the north and Bayraklı/Izmir to the south (Fig. 1). Through the plain flows the Madra Çay, and during the Holocene the river's depositional activity has created a large delta clearly visible on most maps as a projection outward into the Lesbos Channel (also known as the Mytilene/Midilli Strait), with the port of Mytilene and the marina of Thermi lying directly opposite (20 km. away) on the island of Lesbos (Fig. 1, Pl. XXII(a)). Altınova's iskele, located in a sand-spit which forms a natural marina, has developed into a modern holiday resort with 5 km. or more of holiday villas along its sandy beaches.