I. The Problem.—The purpose of this note is to suggest a possible solution of a notorious difficulty in that curious and interesting historical document, the Thalassocracy-list quoted by Eusebius from Diodorus; and, secondly, to trace the historical implications following on the adoption of that suggestion.

The list of ‘those who held the empire of the sea, from the fall of Troy to Xerxes' crossing into Europe,’ was evidently given by Diodorus in the lost ‘second volume’—Books VI to X—of his Historical Library in forty books. That work, we know, was arranged in sections of five books each, the second of which covered exactly that period—from the Τρωικά to the Μηδικά—and this no doubt gives us the reason why the list does not continue so as to cover the thalassocracy of Athens. The latter fact cannot therefore, unfortunately, be used as evidence for an early fifth-century origin for the document. This, however, obviously need not deprive the list of all interest for us, especially since it appears to be corroborated by such evidence on its subject as we have from other sources.

At the invitation of Sir William Ramsay, I make public a formal statement of the information acquired by me in 1912 and 1913 (and communicated informally to him and to others at the time) bearing on the statuette published by him in Athenaeum, 1909, p.736, and in The Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey(1909), pp. 214 ff.,

On the afternoon of June 27th, 1913, after Sir William had left for England, I sat with our common servant, Prodromos the Djinnji, in the garden of the Baghdad Hotel at Konia, making arrangements for a journey which was to begin on the following day. The conversation came round to the ‘Mithraic’ statuette (which Prodromos then declared he had never seen, and which he had always maintained to be genuine), and Prodromos told me that he had seen in the bazaar a statuette similar to my description of it.

The marble which I described with little comprehension and several errors in a letter to the Athenaeum, 1909, p. 736 (repeating the same words in a popular book on the Revolution in Turkey, 1909), is characterised as a forgery by Professor Calder in the preceding pages. I consider it genuine, a unique monument of the old Anatolian religion, when that almost disused cult was revived in the alliance between the Empire and Paganism against Christianity; and the date of the work is in the fourth century. On that alliance see Aberystwyth Studies, iv. p. 1 f. Several very excellent authorities have on careful inspection pronounced it indubitably genuine: I consulted them, as I have always hated the thought of being in any way connected with a forgery; and I have rejected many forgeries. All the facts collected by Calder in 1913 were known to me in 1909, and many more. I could tell about several other forgeries by Missak, whom I heard of only as ‘the Armenian,’ not as Missak, whether it be a true or false name.

In the following pages I have tried to give a brief survey of the progress of epigraphical discovery and discussion during the years 1925 and 1926, following the order of the Inscriptions Graecae in dealing with inscriptions discovered in European lands and that of the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum in the case of those found in Asia or Africa. I have included reviews only in exceptional cases, because they afford summaries of books not generally accessible or because they make some original contribution to the study in question.

During the years under review death has taken a heavy toll among epigraphists, especially in France, which has been bereft of three outstanding scholars—P. Foucart, T. Homolle and B. Haussoullier.

By the kindness of its owner, Mrs. Chester Beatty, I am able to publish an interesting and hitherto unknown fragment of Greek sculpture which has recently come into her possession. It consists of a horse's head made of yellowish-white marble, fine-grained and slightly crystalline in texture. The surface is somewhat corroded in the neighbourhood of the nostrils and ears, and in places is encrusted with the earth in which the head has been buried. No parts are missing, though the mane, ears, and right eye are slightly abraded. There is apparently a trace of red paint above the right eye. The neck has been sawn across in recent times when the head was mounted. The dimensions in metres are as follows: length, 0·355; height, 0·285; average breadth above the eyes, 0·137.

Till quite recently, only one vase was known with a picture of Icarus. The publication of the black-figure fragments from the Acropolis added a second. I am putting a third to these, possibly a fourth and even a fifth.

And Daedalus? He appears on two of the Icarus vases and on one of the possibles. And Hauser has tried to show that the builder on a Laconian cup from Samos is Daedalus constructing the labyrinth. Hauser may perhaps be right; but that the winged figure on a vase in the Louvre is meant for Daedalus, I do not find it so easy as others find it to believe.

This vase is a black-figured kotyle of the sixth century, probably still the first half; it is reported to have been found at Tanagra; the style is a provincial travesty of Attic, and the fabric no doubt Boeotian. On one side, Theseus and the Minotaur: on the other, a helmeted horseman at the gallop, and behind him, in the air, a winged male, bearded and dressed in a short chiton, flying in the same direction.

This article follows the arrangement of its predecessors, and includes an account of all the excavations in Greek lands of which I have received particulars since my last report was completed. As the total number of undertakings concerned amounts to more than thirty, some of my summaries have inevitably suffered in the process of compression, but I trust that nothing of outstanding importance has been passed over.

At Corinth, during the spring and summer of 1926, the American School carried out excavations in four different areas: at the Theatre, on Acrocorinth, on the Temple hill and on the Lechaion Road. An account of Dr. T. L. Shear's work at the Theatre appeared in my last report. On Acrocorinth, Dr. C. W. Blegen examined the highest point of the rock in search of the Temple of Aphrodite mentioned by Pausanias. Though many worked poros blocks were found, it is disappointing that not one was in situ, and cuttings in the rock and numerous architectural fragments are the only indications that there had been a Greek building on this site, which was occupied later by a Byzantine church. The small objects found include Geometric, Protocorinthian and Corinthian pottery, three terra-cotta figurines, two pieces of marble sculpture and a fragmentary inscription.