Epigraphic investigations have led to the creation of this book. For the collection of Greek inscriptions from the islands of the Aegean Sea, which the Academy of Sciences in Berlin undertook, Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen also traveled to Thera. There, he found that the inscriptions required an explanation from the ground they were written on, a rock that cannot be separated from them without losing the best part of their content. Thus, an excavation and measurement of this ground became a necessary consequence. What was unearthed and documented initially benefited the work. However, in the search, one often finds something entirely different from what was intended; sometimes, when a favorable fate intervenes, one truly discovers what was hoped for and even much more than expected.