The Aegean and the near East: Studies Presented to Hetty Goldman on the Occasion of Her Seventy-Fifth Birthday

Abstract

IT WOULD BE impossible to review, or even to summarize, twenty-two articles presented in this attractively bound, carefully printed and edited, and excellently illustrated volume within allotted space. title suggests that there is a greater thematic unity to this Festschrift in honour of a very distinguished and highly respected American archaeologist than is usual in such volumes-and that is true. Most of articles are concerned with some phase of relations between Greece and Near East. A number are rather specialized archaeological studies of objects or classes of objects such as those from royal burials at Alaca Hfiytik by Kosay and by Mellink, of clay sealings from Cyprus by Benson, of Canaanite Jars by Virginia Grace, of Mycenaean figurines by Mylonas and by Frances Jones, of a class of pottery found at Tarsus (Miss Goldman's most important excavation) by Hanfmann, of bronze cauldrons with bull protomes by Amandry, and of Islamic coins from Tarsus by Miles. articles of most immediate interest to readers of Phoenix will probably be a study of Epigrams from Battle of by Benjamin Meritt; The Persian Spoils in Athens by Dorothy Thompson; and of Lydia at Corinth by Saul and Gladys Weinberg. last plausibly identifies sketchy scene on a small Corinthian aryballos of about 600 B.C. as earliest, in fact only, Greek representation of tale of Arachne and her weaving contest with Athena. Dorothy Thompson helps us to visualize spoils captured from Persians, especially at Battle of Plataea, many of which were long displayed in Parthenon to recall the triumphs of their finest hour. Meritt publishes a fragment of a late fourth-century inscription containing closing words of four metrical lines which he demonstrates form part of an epigram on Marathon of which two other fragments of original fifth-century text are known; a combination, with comparatively little restoration, at last provides a satisfactory text of whole epigram. Albright of Johns Hopkins contributes an important study on Northeast-Mediterranean Dark Ages and Early Iron Age Art of Syria. Two quotations will be of especial interest to classicists: The beginning of strong Phoenician influence on Greece is set by borrowing