 Good evening everyone. President, fellows and guests, my paper this evening will be covering three areas. First, a brief overview of the Antikythera shipwreck, its discovery, excavation and chronology. And second, the recovered treasures of bronze, marble and gold. And third, the Antikythera Jewelry, its chronology and origin, as well as Comparanda from the Greek East. Now that is just for decoration with a little bearded vehicle over the ship I should say. The first part of the story begins around 80 BC with the sinking of a merchant ship or freighter, known in antiquity as a Corbiter. It had a capacity of around 300 tons. Of course a Corbiter is not a board vessel, as I have just pointed out, as it would suggest. At the period when the wreck occurred freighters possessed a square sail attached to a central mast and a horizontal boom. A triangular sail hoisted at the top of the mast and an auxiliary side sail, as you can see on the film sketch there. It's thought that the ship was sailing west towards Rome, possibly from either Pergamon or Ephesus and calling it Thelos. That is an old map and I've just recently been to see the exhibition in Athens and these new ideas have come up. So it is now thought that the ship did call in to Thelos. So the ship was travelling along one of the most frequented ancient shipping routes between the eastern and western Mediterranean. It is thought it was caught in the southern violent school of the island of Antikythera, a rocky and barren landmass, really just an islet of only 20 square kilometres. The ship was unable to turn into the wind, so it was driven onto the island's coastal cliffs where it was smashed against the rocks and sank. The modern part of the story begins in the autumn of 1900 when Captain Demetrius Condos and his crew of sponge divers from the Aegean island of Simi were sailing home from their summer diving grounds off the coast of Tunisia. North of Crete they ran into wild weather and decided to shelter from the storm near the small island of Antikythera. Condos sent a diver, Elia Stadiatos, down to search for sponges while they waited out the storm. He surfaced after just a few minutes, agitated and shaking and described a ghostly mound of corpses strewn about in various stages of decay. The captain then went down to investigate. As he dropped through the cold water, a compact shadow of some 15 metres in length loomed ahead in the murky depths. Instead of corpses, however, the divers had stumbled upon the wreck of an ancient merchant ship, lying at a depth of 60 metres on a sloping shelf of rock near to a cliff that dropped down into utter darkness. Ampere, marble and bronze statues littered the seabed around the wreck. What Stadiatos had reported as rocking bodies were actually statues that had been covered, covered over by centuries worth of sea debris. The team scavenged what they could carry, including the right arm of a bronze statue, which you can see on the right, and took it back to Greece, where the Greek Education Ministry and Hellenic Navy put together an expedition to explore the wreck more thoroughly. Six months passed before the sponge divers returned to Antikythera aboard a Navy transport ship accompanied by government representatives and archaeologists. Spiridon Stais, the Greek Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education, was directly responsible for supervising the work. Over the next two years, pains taking underwater archaeological excavations uncovered a vast bounty of marble and bronze statues, coins and other artifacts. The treasures may have been war booty or a commercial cargo, on its way back to Italy from Asia Minor, sometime in the first century BC. The finds were transported to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where the museum staff struggled to cope with the huge influx of objects. You can see how many were crammed into the courtyard. It was literally littered with marble statues, mostly first century BC copies of Roman originals, and I'll ask you to notice the two that have got the red rings around them. These were two of the Homeric heroes from the Iliad, Achilles on the left and Odysseus wearing a conical cap on the right, and they're both badly eroded. They're currently on display as part of the Antikythera exhibition in the Archaeological Museum in Athens. And these two images of the Apollo from the Antikythera shipwreck are quite interesting. You'll notice that the back of the Apollo from the neck to the buttocks, as well as the tripod, are very well preserved. And this is because the statues were found lying on their backs on the seabed and the sand protected the marble from the corrosive effects of the marine life. The photograph on the right is a famous one taken by the German photographer Herbert Mist. This is the most famous sculpture from the wreck. After restoration, of course, the bronze of feed. It's known as the bronze of feed or young man. Like most of the bronzes, it was originally found in multiple pieces. Considered to one of the finest cast-bron sculptures of the Hellenistic period, it's thought to be the work of the great sculptor Euphonor, and dates from around 340 to 330 BC. The naked youth stands firmly on his left leg with the right leg relaxed to the side and the back in the so-called Contrapposto stance, exemplifying the polyclite and cannon of the 5th century BC. At nearly two metres tall, the sculpture is slightly larger than life, and this would suggest that it represents a god or a hero rather than a mortal. Traces of bronze still attached to the youth's fingers show that he originally held something spherical in his raised right hand. He might therefore be identified as a Perseus, holding up the seabed head of Medusa or Paris with the apple of strife, only to reward it to the most beautiful goddess and prodigy. I would like you to note the perfection and the power of the head with its incomparably rendered locks of hair. The sensuous lips, lips, the beautiful inlaid eyes with their extraordinary intense and languorous gaze. The inlaid parts are of different materials. For example, the eyes are inlaid with coloured glass. The eyelashes and the teeth are cut from metal sheets. The lips and the nipples are reddish alloy composed of copper. This early photograph shows more marbles in the museum's storeroom at the back is a headless barnese or weary Heracles leaning against his club similar to the one in the archaeological museum in Naples. A seated marble statue of Zeus is on the right. The rest of the cargo consisted of luxury goods, including glass vessels from Egypt, ceramics and amphorae. Plus some calcified lumps of bronze encased in wood, which lay in the corner of the museum's storeroom and they're up on the left. These uncre-possessing fragments turned out to be the antikithera mechanism, one of the most spectacular finds in the history of archaeology and I'll return to the mechanism shortly. Among the many treasures was a small gold earing pendant, the dancing winged aeros playing the lyre or small pithera. It was published in 1902 in the official report by the Archaeological Society of Athens, that's one of the so-called small finds. One of the authors was an emissantist, J. N. Sovrenos. I took this photograph myself when I was in the museum just last week. It's a beautiful bronze lyre or pithera and it's dated between the 3rd and the 2nd centuries BC and it is mentioned that it could have belonged to an eros or Apollo but if you note the Sathas head on the side, I would say that it most definitely had been part of an eros statue. In 1976, Jacques-Yves Costos Divers and a team of young Greek archaeologists conducted the first ever scientific survey and systematic excavation of the antikithera wreck. With the aid of the bathescape, they were able to reach the depth of the wreck at about 62 metres. The bathescape is a simple but effective device that eliminates water surface reflection to allow underwater viewing as far as water clarity and light permits. Their team of divers equipped with sleek scuba gear, floodlands and powerful suction pipe were successful in bringing whatever was left of this on the seabed up to the surface. They were rewarded with an array of small artifacts including a bronze oil lamp, giant ship's nails and a magnificent Spartan style helmet from a quest from a bronze helmet you can see them playing around with it on the right. There were some jewellery pieces including a beazle element which is over on the right also. Possibly this came from a necklace and it's dated to the 6th century BC as well as some late Hellenistic jewellery. The poor quality images you can see of the two pieces below were taken by me. I was given a Jacques Costa video quite inadvertently just as a matter of interest and I turned it on and I noticed these two pieces and I immediately thought they remind me of something, some jewellery that I had now and fairly weren't from the island of Delos. But Costa was especially pleased with the two bronze statuettes a boxer and a youth. These are two of the bronzes after conservation. And here are all the Costa jewellery vines. On the left a horseshoe shaped earring plate which has retained its gemstones but not its pierced pearls. Note the hinge and the fact that it has no pendant at this point. On the right is an intact, this is the earring that you saw in the rather poor image previously, it's an intact eros earring. And below that cabochon shaped emerald with a bezel setting, a necklace element, a small piece of gold and a little bronze pixels. This was an unusual piece because normally pixides were made of terracotta and they were used for storing jewellery. Since there was a badly eroded skull fragment of a young female found in the wreckage it just may indicate that this group of jewellery was personal and that there was a young female aboard. I will discuss the jewellery and its chronology shortly but it's amazing to think that it was simply stored in the museum and forgotten about for over 100 years until my publication this year. Now a brief look at the fair mechanism itself which is the key to the sophisticated scientific technology possessed by the Greeks of the Hellenistic era. Historians and scientists alike live for that great Eureka moment when some newly discovered fact can turn our understanding on its head and lead to a richer picture of our world and our species. And there are a few scientific or historic discoveries more significant than the one made by the Greek sponge diver in October 1900 on the Mediterranean seabed. The antiquity mechanism which calculated the cycles of the solar system is sometimes called the world's first analog computer because it had the facility for the input of data and output of related data with a conversion mechanism in between. Its origins are still unclear as are the circumstances by which it came to be on a merchant ship but there is no doubt that it was made in Greece. How do we know this? Because according to a local newspaper article of May 1902 the former education minister Spiriton Stais on a visit to the museum noticed that the wood casing had split on one of the bronze lumps to reveal the dented edge of what looked like a fragment-tree gear. He managed to assemble the plaque from further fragments on which an entire gear was visible. It was then that he noticed letters on the obverse of the plaque which turned out to be faint inscriptions in ancient Greek. In total there are 7 and 75 smaller extant fragments. Although the mechanism was cleaned many of the gears remained encrusted and corroded in the remaining stone. The device was driven by a knob at the side which rotated at least 30 gears inside the machine some of which were epicyclic that is gears moving on other gears. To chip the stone away would certainly have destroyed any traces of the gears that remained so scientists looked for other methods to see inside the remaining rock and to determine the full extent of the gears. Here is a synopsis of how they achieved that. In 1954 Derrick Vassola Price a science historian at Yale University began working Athens basing his research on the fundamental properties of gearing. Price concluded that the device was a complex planetarium which reproduced the lunar phases and the movement of the sun and the moon among the constellations of the zodiac. He published his results in 1974 where he presented a working model which is displayed in the bronze collection of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. In 1989 Alan Bromley of the University of Sydney and Michael Wright who was then at the Science Museum in London began a reassessment of the mechanism using better detailed radiographs and linear tomography which provided three-dimensional information. Results of this survey were presented in 1997 which showed that Derrick Vassola Price's earlier model was fundamentally flawed. After Bromley's death in 2000 Wright continued the work alone digitising the radiographs for computer analysis and in 19 and 2005 he completed a fully functional working model which demonstrated there were at least 41 interlocking gears. The new analysis confirmed that the major structure had a single centrally placed dial on the front plate that showed the Greek zodiac and an Egyptian calendar on concentric scales. On the back two further dials displayed information about the timing of lunar cycles and eclipse patterns. Now at Imperial College London Michael Wright's deductions remain fundamental to all subsequent research. Building on Michael Wright's research members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project led by Mike Edmonds, Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University invited scientists from Hewlett Packard United States and ex-tech systems in the United Kingdom to Athens to apply their reflectance imaging techniques to the front and the rear surfaces of more than 70 fragments in order to probe the depths of the device. On the left you can see Gerasimus Macris who places fragment A on a rotating turntable to be examined in the 8th tonne late runner. This machine uses computed tomography or CT scans to record an image every time the turntable moves a tenth of a degree. When they were assembled over 3,000 sectional images gave astonishingly detailed three dimensional micro focus X-rays of the interior. Research published in 2006 by the AMRP revealed that the mechanism was inspired to the text of over 2,000 Greek characters of which 932 could be deciphered at a resolution better than a tenth of a millimetre. Inscriptions can now be read that have not been seen for more than 2,000 years. And here are some of the computed tomography images. The surface imaging and the high resolution X-ray tomography of these sections have enabled scientists to reconstruct how the gears function and in addition, more than double the number of deciphered inscriptions. This image illustrates the spectacular enhancement of the three main fragments of the Antikythera mechanism using polynomial texture mapping known as PTM. PTMs enhance the surface details by stripping the background colour under varying lighting conditions, revealing text and features that are difficult to read from photographs. Above is a CT X-ray image of fragment A showing the geared wheels within the mechanism on two different levels or planes through the gear train. The wheels were capable of carrying motion from one drive shaft to another, all of which were mounted on a bronze plate. Below is a laser scan of one of the gears. Each of the 30 gears has between 15 and 223 triangular hand sawn T, all of the same size and angle, 60 degrees between each of the teeth so that the any wheel could mesh with any other. However, it has been suggested that triangular teeth result in a very coarse mesh, allowing for excessive play between the teeth in contact that cause interference problems. This in turn leads to hard spots in the rotation. Michael Wright, the expert in this area, since he has reproduced hand sawn triangular tooth gears himself, believes that such teeth can be made to work well when they transmit little power and do not run fast, even when roughly made as in the antikythera mechanism. If the knob is always turned in the same way, he says, in bringing the instrument to a setting, whether forward or backward, backlash or lost motion does not spoil the accuracy of the readout. Again, Michael Wright has said that the instrument was not new when it was lost and almost certainly had been altered in antiquity with parts disassembled and reassembled. Originally, these bronze gear trains were housed in a wooden box measuring approximately 33 by 18 centimetres about the size of a normal shoe box. And this case was sealed with two bronze plaques covered with inscriptions. All of this 2,000 years before the first modern computer was invented by Charles Babbage in the early 19th century. The first Babbage engine was completed in London in 2002. Before moving on to the chronology, a very brief summary of the functions of the antikythera mechanism. It calculated the movements of the five planets, known to the Greeks, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, including their retrograde motion relative to the Earth. The movement of the Sun, the movement of the Moon including its acceleration as it gets closer to the Earth. The phase of the Moon, solar and lunar eclipses, the metonic cycle, that is the 19-year cycle which is the least common multiple of the solar year and the lunar month. The 76-year Olympic cycle and finally the four-year cycle of the Olympiad and its associated pan-Hellenic games. Dating the site has been difficult. Based on related works with known provenances, some of the bronzes were dated back to the 4th century BC while the marble statues were believed to be mostly 1st century BC copies of earlier works. Supporting an early 1st century BC date from the 20th century BC, there were a number of artistic utensils and rodient, coen and Italian amphorae and ceramics. Silver and bronze coins recovered by Jacques Cousteau from the cities of Pergamum and Ephesus date from 86 to 67 BC and between 70 and 60 BC. They reinforce the view that this had been a treasured ship on its way back to Rome after one of the three years it was dated to 89 to 85 BC. Peter Thothmorton has published a reconstruction of the wooden fragments of the ship's hull made of elm planking, a wood often used by the Romans in their ships. In 1964, a sample of the hull planking was carbon dated and delivered a calibrated calendar date of 220 BC plus or minus 43 years. The disparity in the calibrated radiocarbon date and the expected date based on the ceramics was explained by the sample plank originating from an old tree cut much earlier than the ship's sinking, but the results must be treated with caution. For example, it's unlikely that an efficient shipwright would have used such old timbers and it cannot be ruled out that the sample may have been contaminated by the use of preservatives immediately after excavation. The coins and the ceramics provide a terminus antiquem of 60 to 70 BC for the sinking of the ship. Ever since the fragments were first noticed in 1902, epigraphers have been trying to date the manufacture of the mechanism using the paleography of the Hellenistic coin inscriptions. The date range of 150 to 100 BC is frequently cited in academic literature. Alexander Jones maintains a without a known provenance and a lot of datable comparanda. The chronology is still an open question. He would broaden the date range anywhere from 200 BC to the date of the wreck around 60 BC. But what about the late Hellenistic jewelry is it possible to date this accurately? I will begin with the first gold erospendum published in 1902. No, something is wrong. It is. Sorry. So I begin with the first erospendum which is on the left. This was published in 1902 and you'll notice that it is now attached to a hindered backing plate. There is no record in the National Archaeological Museum archives of just when this was recovered. But I'm told that was definitely from the anti-cuthera wreck. The three box settings originally held coloured gemstones arranged vertically. Between each of the settings is a narrow band of sheet gold with three rows of granulation. You can see very clearly there. And around the perimeter are 15 pierced pearls threaded on thin gold wires with flattened granulation pearls as stock pieces. Of the two pieces recovered by Jacques Cousteau in 1976, the earring on the far right is very important because it was intact when recovered. And you can see the front and rear views of it there. The erospendum is attached by a toggle pin hinge to a hammered or shoe shaped earring plate. The flying eros holds a loft and open folding mirror. Both the Cousteau earring plates have identical inlays and emerald in the middle flanked by cabochon garnets. But only the intact earring has all its 20 pierced pearls preserved. The plaque in the middle now has been transformed into the addition of a pendant in the form of an alabasteron which was a small perfume bottle. And again, I cannot find out exactly when this was attached to it. Technical and stylistic details are important chronologically because decorative configurations are the result of technology. The earliest hinged earrings, for example, appeared in dated deposits around the last quarter of the 3rd century BC. But pearls were not used in jewellery until early in the 2nd century BC. But what is significant here is that the backing plates on all three anti-githra earrings are closely paralleled by those on a pair of eros earrings from Dealos, found in the sealed, co-indated deposit. And this is the deposit I mentioned previously. But before considering the Dealian earrings it's important to place them in context. The small island of Dealos situated in the Cyclades Islands was a legendary birthplace of Artemis and Apollo. It was a major sacred site for the ancient Greeks second only in importance to Delphi. Dealos reached the height of its prosperity in the late Hellenistic and the Roman periods. It was declared a free port by Rome in 166 BC and became the financial and trading centre of the Mediterranean. Strabo described Dealos as a location of a busy trans-Mediterranean slave market. The island had close trading contacts between Parento, Egypt, northern Greece, east Greece, Antioch, Lebanon and the Bosphorus. Rapid urbanisation of the island took place in this period expanding from the area of the old sanctuary centre upwards to the new neighbourhoods to the north such as the Skardania quarter. And by 100 BC Dealos had a mixed population of about 30,000 people. Then came its decline and destruction. Dealos was devastated and sacked twice in 88 BC by Mithridates, the Greco-Persian king of Pontus on the black sea who attacked the unfortified island to challenge Roman rule over the Greek world. The entire population of 20,000 was killed or sold into slavery. The sanctuary treasures were looted and the city was razed to the ground. The Romans partially rebuilt the city, but in 69 BC the pirates of Athenodorus again devastated the island. It was gradually abandoned in the centuries that followed and in the 2nd century AD Porcenius recorded that it was inhabited only by temple guards. These devastating invasions demonstrate that a cache of precious objects might be concealed for safekeeping and forgotten about for over 2,000 years. And this is exactly what happened. The hoard was discovered in 1964 by French excavators beneath a flagstone in the burned floor of a luxurious private residence in the northern Skardania quarter. You remember this is the new merchant's quarter. People of Italian, Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian heritage lived in this area. It was a mix of shops, private houses and craftsmen's workshops. The house of Ambrosia, named for its mosaic, which you can see on the lower left, was which it decorated with stuccoed walls and mosaic floors. Excavations in the house revealed four successive occupation mayors, two of which coincided with the major invasions of Delos. The second occupation ended in 88 B.C. and the fourth in 69 B.C. The treasure was hidden on one of those dates. Buried together with the jewellery were 59 Athenian New-Star Petra Drachmans, three Rodian gold status and two Rodian gold calf status. The coins have been comprehensively studied and firmly dated to the mid-2nd century B.C. They provide a terminus postquem of 122 B.C. and a terminus antiquem of 69 B.C. In other words, they exclude a concealment prior to 122 or later than 69 B.C. The significance of the hoard lies in the assured archeological unity of the finds, which can thus serve as a chronological and stylistic fixed point. And this is the collection of personal jewellery. It consisted of three medallions, two with Aphrodite and Eros. There are two pairs of earrings, one with Eros at its pendants and a pair of spiral wire links head hoop earrings. There is a pair of spiral wire bracelets, one fingering and three pendant necklaces. As one of the few well-dated unified jewellery groups of the late Hellenistic period, the importance of the House of Ambrosia treasure cannot be overstated. Taking a more detailed look at the Eros-Atas earrings from the Deolos hoard, the pendant erotes where the long-sleeved, long-legged Anatolian bridgian garments of the god Atas. One carries an amphora on his shoulder and the other a sacrificial animal, possibly a she-goat. As I have already mentioned, in addition to the numismatic evidence, late Hellenistic earrings can also be dated according to technical and stylistic criteria, for example, the use of hinges, gemstone inlays and pearls. Another important chronological indicator is that a number of the pieces from the Deolos hoard, in particular the fingering, show definite signs of wear or repair. The links head hoop earrings, for example, had been extensively modified in antiquity with one of the animal heads having been entirely replaced and there on the upper left. According to the excavators, all of the Deolos jewelry exhibiting wear marks can be dated to the 2nd century BC. This is what remains of the building in the Skardania quarter, where the treasure was found. It is now closed to tourists. And this is the same image again with a few extra pieces added. And this is a collection jewelry is in the Archaeological Museum in Deolos. The closest parallels to the earrings from Deolos, the first earring from Deolos, the Kithra plain pendant, come from around the Black Sea area. Intact deposits dated from the late 3rd to the early centuries BC with similar solid class cast eros pendants have been found at Kursh, which is ancient Panticapaeon, and Theodosia in the Crimea. And you'll note the earring on the upper right from Panticapaeon. It has a setting for just two gemstones, which is a slight stylistic variation and we will also see this in a deposit from northern Greece. These earrings from the so-called paleocastro treasure, which was a cremation burial, accidentally brought to light in around 1909 by farmers near Cardista and Thessaly in northern Greece. And these have settings for two gemstones as in the previous Panticapaeon earring. But more importantly, the eros at its pendants closely parallel those from Deolos. The distinctive style of the pendants can help develop theories about possible workshop locations. For example, the eros at its pendants are all solid cast, and the treatment of the facial features with their distinctive heavy-lidded eyes are close to those on a bronze mould for eros earrings, which was found in an understood, Jewelless horde at Galger near Cairo in Egypt. The faces betray an oriental ethnic prototype very close to the terracottas discovered by Fender's factory in Memphis, Egypt. The cult of Isis and Adonis, Attis, developed in Memphis under the Ptolemies and spread to the Aegean in the 3rd century BC. Before concluding, I would like to present several close parallels for the costo earring pendant, which consists of three terracotta erotes from the Hellenistic site of Gordon in Crete, and I've just very recently come across these. Gordon is located 46 kilometres south of Heraklion in central Crete. It was second only to Canossus in importance during the Roman period. Today, Gordon is Crete's largest archaeological site. His ancient remains are scattered around in olive groves over a wide area. Historically, Gordon owes its vein to the stone tablets discovered in 1884 by Italian archaeologists. The tablets were inserted into an open-air wall of a circular assembly building. They were inscribed with the laws of the city-state in the local Lododoric dialect and dealt with the rights of citizens. Excavations have unearthed the number of tombs in the vicinity dating to the Hellenistic period. One of the tombs contained a series of terracotta eros figurines. The three flying terracotta erotes dated to the 2nd century BC were found in the tomb of a young girl together with the levy's gamacosticancy in the centre there, which is a wedding vase and also in models of ostrich eggs which symbolise rebirth in the underworld. We know from Dorothy Byrd Thompson's publication of the Agorau series in 1959 that the baby eros type was not created in terracotta until the middle of the 3rd century BC. The hollow figurines, which you can see there from the broken pieces, were of very high quality. The attention to fine detail would indicate that they were cast in fresh moulds. The advantage of moulding was that the walls of the figure could be reduced to a very regular thickness, obviating the danger of shrinkage during the firing process. It also rendered them very light and emitted great accuracy in detail as can be clearly seen in these figures. Most flying figures are equipped with either clay loops or small holes through which cords could be fitted so that the figures could be suspended in attitudes of flight. At Gorton, from the early Hellenistic period there was supposedly a markedly independent chloroplast industry, but no evidence remains of this quarter or workshop complex for chloroplast production. This may indicate that the figures were imported. I saw these recently in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul and included them because again you can see the beautifully model lifelike figure, this is in Aphrodite and the fact that it is hollow inside with very thin walls. The mirror was halfway between the powerful centres of Smyrna and Pergamon, but was a place of no political importance in antiquity but as I had just said some of the finest terracotta figures were found here. In the early 1880s French archaeologists excavated around 5,000 tombs in Mirana and the finds included around 2,000 terracottas. These eros figurines holding circular hinged box mirrors were found also in Mirana but leaving aside the folding mirrors these provide close parallels for the Gorton erotes. The Gorton terracottas are made of yellow buff clay fired to a pinkish red. They have raised arms and hands spread as if to support an attribute, perhaps a folding mirror which I had inserted there. The figures are lightly draped around the legs. The arrangement of the hair with the curls framing the face, very very similar to the eros earring even to the earrings. These charming terracottas are carefully and delicately modelled with a good understanding of the childish form. The chubby body and legs, right leg thord and the left drawn back raised on tiptoe in a bouncing pose plus the feathered wings are almost identical to the gold earring pendant. The Gorton terracottas are on a larger scale and nevertheless demonstrate how closely Chora Plus and Goldsmiths influenced each other in the late Hellenistic period. It's thought that some gilded terracotta jewellery may have been moulded on actual jewels and I would welcome comments on this later. The terms of Taranto in southern Italy have numerous examples of such cost effective jewellery in the form of wreaths, diadems, necklaces and earrings. This pair of gilded terracotta earrings on the left from a tomb in Taranto provide excellent examples. There can be no doubt that they were inspired by if not actually moulded on the two gold earrings with the eros mikes on the right, one from a tomb in Taranto and the other from a tomb in Curshpantica peion both dated to the second half of the fourth century BC. To restate my main points before concluding while the erotes pendants from Delos and Paleocastro exhibit differences in detail which may reflect their place of manufacture the earrings are technically, stylistically and typologically linked. All were cast in mirror image by the lost wax technique with the wings and the attributes attached later but crucially it is the decorative earring plates that link them all together from logically. In conclusion, the following points may be restated. Unlike the Paleocastro treasure the significance of the Delian Horde lies in the assured archaeological unity of the finds and this is very rare with jewellery particularly for late Hellenistic jewellery. It constitutes one of the few sealed late Hellenistic groups where the provenance and the conditions surrounding its discovery are known with certainty. The hinged backing plates on the earrings salvaged from the Antikithra shipwreck closely parallel those on the Delos earrings which dates then securely to around 150 BC a date which coincides with the accepted date for the manufacture of the Antikithra device but of course this is now very much open to question. While neither the mechanism nor the earrings from the wreck can provide absolute dates their relative dates are vital as chronological reference points for ongoing research. In addition, given the international nature of Hellenistic art, the series of terracotta erotes from Borton may help place the Antikithra costo earrings in the wider Mediterranean coin of production and practice. While scientists in the 21st century continue to unravel the secrets of the remarkable Antikithra mechanism it seems that the words of Sophocles ring true. Many are the wonders of the world but none more wonderful than man. And thank you very much for listening to me tonight.