The identification of the Early Helladic civilisation has been the most notable advance made in Greek prehistory since the war. Our knowledge of this earliest Aegean culture on the Mainland is still very fragmentary. But the Louvre has possessed for nearly fifty years a precious document which can now be assigned its true place and sheds an unexpected light on the epoch. It is a gold ‘sauce-boat’ of the form already so familiar in clay at Korakou and Tiryns. Thanks to the courtesy of M. Etienne Michon, Conservator of the Greek and Roman Antiquities, I am permitted to publish this remarkable object (Fig. 1).

Save for the handle, our vase has been beaten out of a single piece of metal. The walls are exceedingly thin, not more than ·3 mm. thick, but, as with the gold beakers from Troy, measuring more at the rim, the edge being ·9 mm. across. The base is cupped to form a ring foot, a procedure also adopted by Trojan and Sumerian metal-workers. The handle is formed by a strip of gold with rectangular cross section, flattened at either end to receive the rivets which attach it to the vase. Its three outer sides are engraved with a herringbone pattern. The complete vessel weighs 125·2 grammes.