Last year was not remarkable for any sensational archaeological discovery in Greece, but much good work was done, and the amount that was accomplished by the Greek authorities in spite of the interruption of the Balkan War is very creditable to their zeal and enthusiasm. It is perhaps fitting to offer them the congratulations of all interested in Greek archaeology on the amount of new ground that is now available for scientific study.

In the minds of those who have known Athens in past years this season will perhaps be best remembered as the first after the definite retirement of Dr. Dörpfeld from his position as First Secretary of the Imperial German Institute in Athens. It is hard to estimate what his loss means not archaeologically only but also socially to Athens and to the students who go there, but happily through his work in Corfu his connexion with Greece is not yet severed.

The objects which form the subject of the present paper, and which may be easily identified by the accompanying cuts, Nos. 5—8, have for some time been a puzzle to students of Mycenaean archaeology. Certain specimens exhibited in the cases of the Mycenae Room in the Polytechnic Museum at Athens are described as ‘objects of unknown use’; and although some suggestions have been thrown out in various publications of isolated examples, I do not think any satisfactory explanation of them has yet been offered. The cause of this failure seems to be the impossibility of understanding properly any such specimen, apart from the whole class to which it belongs. I will therefore begin this paper with a list of instances which, while not pretending to be exhaustive, is at least representative, and so will give some notion of the character, size, shape, and material of the objects now before us.

Professor G. E. Rizzo, in his Saggi Preliminari su L'Arte della Moneta nella Sicilia Greca—a book beautifully produced, and ennobled by Bar Pennisi's wonderful photographs—has done me the honour of quoting several passages from a lecture delivered before the British Academy in 1934, and published in volume XX of its Proceedings under the title Late Archaic and Early Classical Greek Sculpture in Sicily and South Italy.

Since his quotations embody some variants from what I wrote, he will perhaps allow me to correct the more ingenious, leaving aside those where only his English is at fault and any reader interested in accurate scholarship can compare my original text with his rendering of it. But after disposing of this personal matter, and ignoring the frequent abuse which serves to add bulk and save reasoning, I shall quickly pass to a consideration of certain features of his archaeological method; not doubting the prolonged, profound and silent studies here proclaimed, but attempting to judge them rather by their results than by their advertisement.

The ancient building which I propose to describe, one of the most interesting of its kind in Cyprus and the East, has been casually mentioned by A. P. di Cesnola (Salaminia, p. 2, 1882) as a wall; ‘perhaps a part of the ancient wall bounding the interior area of the harbour :’ an architectural, topographical, and geological impossibility. By R. H. Lang (Cyprus 1875, p. 25) as ‘a Cyclopean ruin.’ By Unger and Kotschky, who add to an insufficient account an indifferent drawing (Die Insel Cypern, Wien, 1865, p. 533), but, with greater judgment, describe it as a Cyclopean well temple. L. Ross (Denkmäler u. Forschungen, Arch. Zeitung, April 1851, p. 328) calls it a Phoenician tomb, cp. L. P. di Cesnola, Cyprus, p. 171, German edit. R. Pocock (1745, II. 217) speaks of it as ‘a chapel built of three stones, the four sides consisting only of two stones, and it is covered with a third, which is angular at the top. If I mistake not, I may say, this Saint (Catherine) was buried in this chapel, and there seems to have been a tomb in it.’ I begin by explaining my drawings, made with great care on the spot; every stone was measured, and reduced to scale. R denotes rock, M masonry. See Pl. XXXIII.

The contents of the famous ‘Grotta of Isis’ discovered on the Polle-drara estates at Vulci in 1839 have been generally known to archaeologists ever since the publication in 1844 of Micali's Monumenti Inediti, where a selection of them is given on Pll. iv.—viii., pp. 37—71. The quality however of the drawings there given is very far from answering the present requirements of study: and an adequate publication of these important remains has long been badly wanted. In the course of last year Professor Victor Horsley had a series of elaborate drawings made of some of the principal objects in the tomb, as a present to Professor Montelius. As the latter did not intend to publish the drawings in their elaborate form, Professor Horsley most kindly arranged with Mr. Murray that some of the more important should be presented to the Hellenic Society; it is thus owing to him that the Society is enabled to put this valuable series of drawings within the reach of scholars.

The periodic festival known as the Χρυσάνθινα celebrated at Sardis in the late Imperial period is known already from numerous inscriptions, noted below. This note concerns an unpublished letter of the year 1838, which contains a brief allusion to an inscription, apparently now lost, in which the festival is mentioned.

In 1838 Henry Wentworth Acland, aged at the time 23, and an undergraduate of Christ Church, visited the Troad from H.M.S. Pembroke, in which he was cruising in the eastern Mediterranean for the sake of his health, to study the topography of that region.

I derive the materials of the present paper from some memoranda which I find amongst my archaeological notes and which relate to certain explorations to which I was not a party, made so long ago as 1887. I have thought that the particulars then obtained may be deemed sufficiently interesting to deserve a record in the history of Trojan archaeological discovery.

The subject is one of the four small tumuli dotted about and near the hill of Balli-Dagh, the crest of which according to the now exploded theory of Le Chevalier (1785) was supposed to represent the Pergamos of Troy. In a memoir contributed to the Journal of the Archaeological Institute of 1864, I proved that the site in question was no other than that of the ancient city of Gergis. In the same paper I gave an account of the results of the excavation of one of the group of three tumuli on Balli-Dagh, the so-named Tomb of Priam. The other two, namely Le Chevalier's Tomb of Hector, and an unnamed hillock, were excavated respectively by Sir John Lubbock (about 1878) and Dr. Schliemann (1882) without result. The present relates to the fourth mound on the road between the villages of Bournarbashi and Arablar (as shown in the published maps), which goes by the name of Choban Tepeh (Shepherd's hillock) and the Tomb of Paris, according to Rancklin (1799).

Asia Minor, interposed like a bridge between Europe and Asia, has been from time immemorial a battlefield between the Eastern and Western races. Across this bridge the arts, civilisation, and religion of the East had passed into Greece; and back over the same bridge they strove to pass beautified and elevated from Greece into Asia. The progress of the world has had its centre and motive power in the never-ceasing collision of Eastern and Western thought, which was thus produced in Asia Minor. One episode in the long conflict has been chosen by Herodotus as the subject of his prose epic: but the struggle did not stop at the point he thought. It has not yet ended, though it has long ceased to be of central importance in the world's history. For centuries after he wrote Greek influence continued to spread, unhindered, further and further into Asia: but as the Roman empire decayed, the East again became the stronger, and Asia Minor has continued under its undisputed influence almost up to the present day. Now the tide has again turned, and one can trace along the western coast the gradual extinction of the Oriental element. It does not retreat, it is not driven back by war: it simply dies out by a slow yet sure decay. It is the aim of this set of papers to throw some light on one stage in this contest, a stage probably the least known of all, the first attempts of the Greek element to establish itself in the country round the Hermus. Tradition has preserved to us little information about the first Greek settlements. The customary division into Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric colonists is not a sufficient one. Strabo clearly implies that there was a double Aeolic immigration when he says (p. 622) that Cyme founded thirty cities, and that it was not the first Aeolic settlement; in another passage (p. 582) he makes the northern colonists proceed by land through Thrace, the southern direct by sea to Cyme. I hope by an examination of the country and the situations, never as yet determined, of the minor towns, to add a little to the history of this Southern Aeolic immigration, in its first burst of prosperity, through the time when it was almost overwhelmed in the Lydian and Persian empires and was barely maintained by the strength of the Athenian confederacy, till it was finally merged in the stronger tide of Greek influence that set in with the victory of Alexander. More is known of Myrina, and still more of Cyme, than of any of the other towns: but both are omitted here, because it may be expected that considerable light will be thrown on the history of both by the excavations conducted on their sites by the French School of Athens. Till their results are published, it would be a waste of time to write of either city.

The strong point of D. Mirhady's work (hereafter ‘M.’) lies in his interpretation of the rhetorical handbooks (technai). I agree in general with Part III, though admitting my lack of specialist knowledge in this field. To a large extent Part III confirms my observations on procedural law published in 1977 (Beweisführung, quoted supra n. 4). I approve of the opinion that, despite the use of written rather than oral testimony, the formulas, by which the evidence was used, did not change (M. after n. 62, see my recent article in: Die athenische Demokratie, ed. W. Eder [Stuttgart 1995], p. 329 f.). M. states an appealing hypothesis, that the introduction of written testimony did not so much change the procedure as provide the cause for a new handbook on rhetoric to be written, which he suggests was the common precursor to Aristotle and Anaximenes.