At the close of last year's Report (British School Annual, vol. ii., p. 76) it was stated that we had begun late in the season of 1896 an excavation on a site at Phylakopi, in the north-east of the island. The results then obtained were of so promising a character, that it was determined to constitute Phylakopi as the main objective of the campaign of 1897, and in fact to lay siege to the prehistoric fortress with all the forces at our disposition.

These excavations began on Thursday, 13th May, in the afternoon: on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, seven men were engaged upon them, but on Monday five more were employed. On Tuesday, at midday, they were brought to an abrupt close by a peremptory telegram from the General Ephor in Athens, forbidding all tentative excavation in Melos.

This field was partially excavated last year by Mr. Bosanquet, and the results of his work are described in the Annual for 1895–6: it was hoped that excavations continued this year under easier conditions would throw fresh light upon the system of walls connected with the city gate, and any public buildings which might have been situated there.

I. The Site.—The late Dr. Dümmler was struck, on his visit to Melos, by the difference between the pre-Mycenæan tombs at Phylakopi and those that he had just seen opened in Amorgos. Still another, a third variety, had been reported from Syros. Not that the discrepancy disturbed his view of the pre-Mycenæan question. What the want of uniformity proved, to his mind, was merely that uniformity was not to have been expected.

It is, however, becoming more and more evident that at one period one particular type of entombment, the Amorgan type, prevailed all over the Cyclades. Pappadopoulo's account of the Syran graves is not to be taken any more seriously than his account of their contents.

The following notes deal partly with some results of our first season in Melos, partly with Ægean objects in English collections. Mr. Cecil Smith and Mr. Edgar have given me help which I gratefully acknowledge. Incidentally some progress has been made with the task, which Dümmler deemed hopeless, of identifying the scattered contents of the tombs at Phylakopi. Much remains to be done by the comparative study of objects on museum shelves. Still more necessary is the systematic excavation of cemeteries, a branch of research which Greek archæologists have too often left to peasants in the pay of dealers.

After the close of the excavation season of the British School at Melos last year, I availed myself of the opportunity afforded by a prolonged stay to explore the island. The sites of Komia, Palæochori, and Hagia Kyriaki had been previously visited by me in company with Mr. Charles Clark, architect to the British School, but as the former visits had been limited to one day I revisited the sites mentioned more at leisure afterwards. In order to become more familiar with the people and the districts I stayed several days at or near each of the sites, sleeping usually in the threshing-floors near the farm-houses.

The excavations of the British School at Athens, in the winters of 1896 and 1897, had the result of determining that the site, on which they were carried on, had been a burial ground previous to the sixth century B.C. and again after the third century, and that, in the meantime, it must have been covered by the Greek building, of which we laid bare the foundations. The plan of this building resembles that of a large gymnasium; the period of its existence coincides with that during which we know the gymnasium of Kynosarges to have existed, and the position of the site is such as the various mentions of Kynosarges by classic authors leads us to expect.

The following inscription, which I have the privilege of publishing here, is said to have been found in Plakka (the quarter of Athens near the Arch of Hadrian); it is at present in the library of the British School at Athens.

The Athena Parthenos of Pheidias is so well known to us from the records of antiquity, and from the works of art which have come down to us more or less inspired by it, that we can safely claim to know at least what the essential features of the statue must have been; and yet there is, and must always be, in the almost certain impossibility of our recovering any part of the original, a large residuum of uncertainty and conjecture, not only as regards the details, but principally as regards the artistic form of Pheidias' figure. Where knowledge can only be based on deduction from a series of more or less closely connected data, every fresh addition to these data must be welcomed as ever so slight a strengthening of probabilities; and therefore the acquisition of a fresh piece of evidence is important, even though it adds but little to our preconceived ideas.

The importance of the bronze statuette as a document for the reconstruction of early sculptural types and of the different phases through which Greek art passed is apt to be overlooked, but there is reason to suppose that the main lines of an antique conception are more likely to be preserved in it than on a marble adaptation made after a lapse of several centuries. Many of the most celebrated Greek statues were made for temples. A large proportion of the bronzes were votive offerings, and roughly reproduce a local cultus-statue, where any serious variation from the original design would not be tolerated; the difference consisting in the suppression of detail, not in the addition of it, as in a marble copy. Further, the mechanical method by which a bronze is reproduced effectually prevents the intrusion of the worker's personality, so that a second century cast from a fifth century mould is practically contemporary with the original design.

On a bien voulu faire à ces quelques notes l' honneur de les insérer dans l' Annuaire de l' École anglaise. Je ne voudrais pas que l' on mesurât à la faiblesse de mesσυμβολαίla gratitude que je dois et que je garde à l' hospitalière maison de Kolonaki. Puissent mes jeunes camarades de l' École française trouver à l' École anglaise des amitiés pareilles à celles que j' y ai faites ! Je ne puis former pour eux de meilleur vœu.

I saw the four reliefs which form the subject of the present study in Turkey; three are in the Museum at Constantinople, and one at Aïdin (Tralles), at which latter place two of them are known to have been found. I publish them together in the hope that they may add some fresh information on the difficult question of Archaistic Reliefs.

The sculptured slab represented on Pl. XIV. was found recently somewhere in the hills about Tarhuna, namely, in the eastern section of the line of high ground which lies about a day's journey from the sea behind the coast desert between Oea (Tripoli) and Leptis Magna (Khoms or Lebda). It was seen in private possession at Khoms in 1896 by Mr. H. Swainson Cowper, has since been acquired by him, and is now in his house, Yew Field Castle, Outgate, Ambleside. He has figured and briefly described it already in his recent account of his journeys in the province of Tripoli; but has kindly permitted the reproduction of it here, from a fresh photograph, and with a rather fuller commentary, in the preparation of which a number of valuable references and suggestions have been very kindly placed at the disposal of the writer by M. P. Perdrizet, Member of the French School of Archæology in Athens.

A complete, or nearly complete, pavement of opus sectile, that is, a pavement of variously shaped slabs of ornamental marbles laid in a pattern, is one of the rarest remains of classical antiquity. In the whole of Italy not a single complete pavement of that description is believed to exist, with the exception, of course, of the pavement of the Pantheon in Rome, and one or two insignificant examples at Pompeii; so that we have to judge of the extent to which the beauties of pattern, colour, and execution were carried in this class of decoration from remains seldom containing more than a few superficial feet, and consider ourselves fortunate that so much is left. A large and very fine piece has, it is true, been recently uncovered in the Forum of Nerva; but as it is at present unprotected from the weather and, moreover, used (with the permission of the municipality of Rome) as an asylum for stray cats, it will not be long before it is disintegrated by damp and frost.

Since the article by De Witte in Annali dell' Inst. 1877, p. 294, this subject has not received much attention from archaeologists, although the material has in the interval sensibly increased. In publishing here three documents of a somewhat new interest to the study of Panathenaic amphorae, I propose merely to offer some suggestions which may be worth consideration when the subject comes to be once more comprehensively worked out.

The gem of which an engraving (in twice the actual size) is here given is a carnelian intaglio, which I found in a private collection in London in 1895. The owner, a Greek lady, resident in London, brought it to me with a bagful of similar gems, all of which had been in her possession from childhood. It appears that as a child she lived with her family at Constanza (Kustendje), and that the children playing on the beach there used frequently to find and make collections of Greek gems washed up by the sea or lying among the sand and pebbles. Her collection comprised some thirty or forty, all of which undoubtedly date from the first to the third century A.D.; but this was the only one of real importance; it was bought on my representation by Sir A. W. Franks and presented to the British Museum, where it is now exhibited among the Christian antiquities.

No one who visits any corner of Turkish Greece can fail to be struck with the closeness of the links which bind it to free Hellas; he will find not only that the language and religion are the same, but that an identity of manners and customs exists, both in society at large, and also among those families which have happily survived the Turkish domination. A strange point is that certain ancient customs, which are to-day represented in no part of free Hellas, are still kept up and flourish in Macedonia.

Of the writing of Greek grammars there is no end, and the reading of them is a weariness to the flesh. Most of them are unpractical enough, and give the student imaginary things for real. How many a boy has been persuaded to accept as good Greek the whole of dear old τύπτω as set forth in the paradigms ever since the first book printed in Greek—the Grammar of Lascaris—was constructed for the torment of the young! How often do rules piled upon rules obscure our sense of a living and real language! It is not, therefore, easy to persuade men that have a long and daily habit of reading Greek to turn back to a grammar, unless they are obliged to look for that most idle of all knowledge—theoretical rules to set down upon examination papers. Yet Prof. Jannaris has overcome this strong repugnance in me, and I labour at his very voluminous and intricate book with profit, and with an interest I never before felt in such a book. Not that he persuades me of all his theories—far from it; but he attacks and strives to solve the standing problems which recur perpetually to the honest student of classical Greek, and which ought, we imagine, to have been long since solved.