The fifth season of excavation at Beycesultan took place in May and June of 1958. In addition to the Director and Mr. James Mellaart, the staff included Mr. David Wilson (Institute joint-scholar for 1958), Mrs. Selina Tomlin as architect and Bay Osman Aksoy representing the Turkish Government. In this season two main tasks remained to be completed. One of these was the clearance of a large religious building, of the “Burnt Palace” period (Level V), one corner of which had been uncovered in 1957, beneath the Late Bronze Age shrines in Area “R”. The other was the completion of the deep sounding (“SX”) in the Chalcolithic levels, begun in 1957. Mr. Mellaart took charge of this latter operation and has summarised the results in a separate section of this report. Those of his own 1958 excavations at Hacılar, near Burdur, whose stratigraphical implications are closely related, also appear elsewhere.

The second season at Hacılar lasted from the middle of August till the middle of September. The writer was in charge, assisted for part of the time by Mrs. Mellaart, and by the Director in an advisory capacity. Miss Elizabeth Beazley, Mr. David Stronach and Mr. David French dealt most efficiently with the architecture, photography and field supervision and pottery respectively. The Turkish Government was again represented by Bay Osman Aksoy. The expedition is much indebted to the Vali of Burdur, Bay Turhan Kapanlı, especially for his generous loan of a bulldozer to assist in re-levelling the site after excavation; also to the Gendarme Commander of Burdur and the Maarif Müdürü, for facilitating our relations with the peasant owners of the site, and for permission to use the large school at Hacılar as expedition headquarters.

The region discussed in the present article lies on the Phrygian border of Pisidia, just beyond the eastern boundary of the province of Asia, and in the north-west corner of the enlarged province of Pamphylia as reconstituted by Vespasian; previously it belonged to the huge and straggling province of Galatia. It coincides approximately with the Milyas as defined by Strabo 631, and nowadays with the eastern half of the vilâyet of Burdur. First visited by Lucas in 1714, then by Arundell in 1833 and Schönborn in 1842, this region was, towards the end of last century, the scene of considerable activity on the part of scholar-explorers.

In May 1958, while looking for Classical remains in Eastern Pisidia, I copied the following honorific inscription in the town of Beyşehir, which lies at the south-east corner of the lake of the same name, anciently Karalitis. Its situation and surroundings are shown in Fig. 1.

The text is carved on a rectangular slab of yellowish limestone, exposed to view by the removal of wall plaster. This is probably one face of the shaft of a statue-base, which has been built into the outer corner of a shop facing on to the main square. The shop also forms an outer wall to the Şen hotel, and the inscription is said to have come to light during repairs to the hotel, some six years previously. The final letters of the inscription are slightly damaged on both sides, but otherwise it is complete. Rosette below. H. 0·78 m., W. 0·43 m., Th. unknown. Letters 3 cm. high.

The Pisidian city of Prostanna is mentioned in only two literary sources: Ptolemy (V, 5, 7) gives it as Prostama, while the list of bishops attending the Council of Constantinople in 381 includes Attalus Prostamensis among the Pisidian bishops.

The only official inscription mentioning it is one from Delos, in which the Demos of the Prostaenneis honoured a quaestor propraetore of the Province Asia in 113 B.C. The comparatively numerous coins give the name as Prostanna, and some of them bear representations of a conical mountain entitled Viaros (Οὐιαρος) or of a river-god Tioulos.

As long ago as 1890, Ramsay proposed to equate Mt. Viaros with the conspicuous sugar-loaf of rock at the southern end of Lake Eğirdir, immediately above the town of Eğirdir itself.

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a series of problems which arise from a comprehensive study of the architectural remains of Troy I and II discovered by H. Schliemann, W. Dörpfeld and C. W. Blegen. One had hoped that Professor Blegen himself would publish at least a detailed plan showing how the newly discovered walls were related to those found by the earlier excavators; for there are problems arising from such a combination of plans which might have been solved with little expense or difficulty by the excavators on the spot, whereas to solve them now would require a new expedition. However, it is twenty years since the conclusion of the University of Cincinnati's excavations at Troy, and neither in the final publication of the results of the expedition, which appeared in 1950, nor elsewhere, has any such synthesis been attempted by him.

The subject of this paper is a small group of cups found by Sir Leonard Woolley in his excavations at Al Mina (now in the Turkish Hatay). It has been hitherto ignored because, with some reason, the vases were believed neither to be Greek imports nor the products of Cypriot or North Syrian potters. I hope to demonstrate that they could be the work of Greek potters established at Al Mina towards the end of the 8th century B.C. by discussing their apparent relationship to contemporary Greek, Cypriot and North Syrian work. Most of the cups and fragments are in Oxford, and there are fragments in the London Institute of Archaeology and the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge which I have seen. Nos. 1–23 in Fig. 1 and Plates XXIV–XXV illustrate the shapes and all the types of decoration met in the group.

All are two-handled cups, the Greek geometric skyphos. The shape, with decoration of this type, is most common in Euboeo-Cycladic vases of the second half of the 8th century, and a considerable number of these skyphoi were carried to Al Mina by the Greeks. It was rarely imitated in Cyprus, as we shall see, and is not at home further east.

The ritual text published by H. Otten as K.U.B. XXXVI 89 + 88 is of great interest both for its linguistic and lexicographical difficulties and for the religious importance of the myth which it contains. This myth is concerned with the Weather-god of Nerik, and although the state of the tablet is too poor for a complete reconstruction to be made, the mutilated fragment that remains bears a striking resemblance to the well-known Telipinus-myth. It begins (obv. 12) with the withdrawal of the Weather-god in anger.

Adilcevaz lies on the north shore of lake Van, almost due south of the summit of Süphan Dağ (14,547 ft.). At its west end substantial remains of a lofty wall of later than Urartian times run down from below the Ahlat road to the shore of the lake (and actually into the lake, of which the relative level has evidently risen since the construction of the wall). It was on a largely concealed face (at right-angles to the line of the wall) of a stone block in this wall that it was reported that cuneiform writing could be seen.

Accordingly, in September, 1956, the writer inspected the wall, accompanied by his wife, who located the block some fifteen metres below the road in a short secondary wall-surface of dressed blocks, with hard rubble filling behind, parallel with the line of, and running inland from the broken end of a further wall projecting three or four metres in the Adılcevaz direction from, the main wall. The cuneiform writing proved to be visible as a result of the absence, close to the surface, of mortar between the inscribed block and the one lake-ward of it in the same course; and on poking away more mortar between the two blocks and up to the under surface of a third, larger, block, forming part of the next higher, and uppermost surviving, course, it was found that this under surface also bore cuneiform signs.

In Antiquity the opinion was strongly held that the Etruscans came from Asia Minor, and in modern times their many connections with that country have long been self-evident.

There have been three theories about their origin; the oriental, the northern and the autochthonous. Of these even Pallottino, who favours the autochthonous theory, says that the oriental is the best known and the most widely accepted, though he rejects it on the ground that there is little evidence for a settlement in central Italy in the Bronze Age. Then, though he mentions the Teresh of the Egyptian monuments and the probability of the identity of that name with that of the Tyrsenoi, he passes on to a discussion of the Orientalising civilisation of the 8th and 7th centuries. In the same way Brandenstein discusses Herodotus' account of Tyrsenos and other similar records and the Turuscha (Teresh), yet later on uses the alphabet, the Urartian connections, etc., as evidence for the oriental origin of the Etruscans. But these of course belong to the 8th and 7th centuries not to the time of Tyrsenos and the Teresh.