The history of ancient decorative wall-painting has yet to be written. The attention of the whole world was attracted by the wonderful discoveries made in Pompeii, and indeed for many years Pompeii stood for ancient decorative wall-painting in general.

That Pompeii so completely overshadowed modern ideas on the evolution of this art is due in great measure to the fact that at Pompeii it had found a wonderful exponent and explorer in the late Professor August Mau. His book dealing with the Pompeian decorative mural painting at once became a classic and influenced profoundly text-books and popular works on the history of ancient art and customs.

Two facts, however, should be borne in mind. First, that the decoration of Pompeian houses illustrates the art of one epoch. only—the Hellenistic and the earlier Roman Empire, except for a few examples from a still earlier age, and those not before the third century B.C. Also it should be remembered that this art at Pompeii can be taken as characteristic only of Italy and indeed only of Southern Italy; it does not follow that it developed on the same lines in other regions of the ancient world.

I do not know of any book or published paper devoted to Cleostratus. In the indexes to most histories of astronomy you will seek his name in vain, and, where you do find it, you are referred to a few jejune paragraphs or more often to a single sentence. Boll in his Sphaera (1903) honours him with three pages (191–194), based on a passage in Pliny and a scholium on Euripides, but he misinterprets both passages and holds one of them to be based on a misunderstanding of some older writer. Nearly all the passages bearing on him are to be found with notes of varying value in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ii. (1912), pp. 197, 198, where they occupy rather more than a page. Some valuable comments and one reference which is not in Diels will be found in Breithaupt's treatise De Parmenisco Grammatico (1915). And yet, for all this neglect, there are attributed to Cleostratus two capital contributions to Greek astronomy, viz. the introduction of the signs of the zodiac and the authorship of the eight years' cycle of intercalations.

Prehistoric research shows us that in the troubled section of Europe known as the Near East there existed as early as the neolithic period several culture groups which may be classified under four heads as follows:—

(1) The Aegean, Minoan-Mycenaean group.

(2) The Thessalian.

(3) The Upper Balkan and Danubian.

(4) The South Russian and allied groups.

The first of these is so familiar that we need only emphasize its continuity from the neolithic period through the Bronze Age, and the fact that, although eventually it was widely diffused through the Mediterranean from Spain to Cyprus and the coast of Palestine, in the Aegean area itself the northern limit on the west coast was Thessaly, which it reached in the L. M. period, and on the opposite shore the single site toward the north is Troy, where L. M. is contemporary with the VIth city. The sporadic examples on the coast from Thessaly to Troy are very late and apparently had little influence.

The excavations by Messrs. Wace and Thompson in prehistoric Thessaly, which included considerably more than one hundred sites, have led them to differentiate a large number of styles of pottery, including red monochrome, red or black incised, or else painted either light on dark or dark on light in many varieties. The designs are predominantly rectilinear and more closely akin to the northern groups than to the Minoan.

In the Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxxv. 1 (1915), Mr. Ellis Minns has given an interesting account of three documents found at Avroman, west of Hamadan, and has deciphered two of them which are in Greek. The third is written in an Aramaic alphabet which has hitherto remained undeciphered. Mr. Minns was good enough to send me a photograph of it, but I postponed an examination of this until I could have an opportunity of seeing a second text, also in Aramaic letters, but attached to one of the Greek documents and therefore presumably relating to the same transaction. When a photograph of this second text arrived, however, it was not distinct enough to be of any use; the ink of the original had been too much rubbed to allow the forms of the letters to be fixed with certainty.

At the recent temporary rearrangement of the sculpture galleries of the British Museum a cast of the Aphrodite was accidentally placed by the side of the large Apollo discovered at Cyrene by the British excavating party. This Apollo has, it appears to me, suffered from an inadequate appreciation of later Greek art, especially of the Eastern schools, and it has been a victim to our poverty in descriptive terms. By this poverty Greek sculptures which are later than what has been supposed a ‘good period’ are all swept up together as ‘Roman’. Roman Art at the simplest is quite the most difficult to determine because so little of it was truly and characteristically Roman. The term is used as of local significance, then in an imperial sense and again of an undefined span of time.

In my last epigraphical summary (J.H.S. xxxv. 260 ff.) I dealt with the period from July 1914 to June 1915 inclusive. The present article continues the record down to the close of 1918. The conditions of the three and a half years which it thus attempts to cover will, I hope, prove a sufficient excuse for any omissions which may exist—as I fear they must—in the following pages. That the output of these years should have been so much smaller than that of normal times will cause no surprise: what is surprising is rather the fact that so many books and articles should have appeared, including not a few of great and permanent value, during a world-crisis which has demanded the thought and activities of many, and the lives of some, who would otherwise have been engaged in epigraphical work—a fact which affords striking testimony to the vitality of the studies with which this article deals. Actual excavation has naturally been brought almost completely to a standstill, and the number of inscriptions published for the first time is consequently small, but noteworthy progress has been made in the restoration and interpretation of numerous previously known, and in some cases very familiar, documents.

Since finishing this paper I have observed a serious omission in it. I have not given any exact reproduction of the pattern on the headband produced by the inlaying of silver. This defect I now remedy. Mr. E. H. New has made for me a careful drawing from the original, in natural size.

The pattern is of a familiar type, the alternate lotus and bud: but it is a very interesting variety, to which I have not found any exact parallel. The form, indeed, is much more like a palmette than a lotus. The base from which the leaves spring is boat-shaped, not oblong, and there seems to be in the drawing some attempt at perspective. We know, in fact, that the principles of perspective were applied, not to landscape but to architecture, as early as the middle of the fifth century. On the central leaf of one palmette there are traces of a pattern.