Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Exploration of the mythic concept of Aia, region of the rising sun, and its Hurrian and Luvo-Hittite background, its introduction to European Mycenaean Greeks by the Ur-Aeolians (Ahhiyawans) of Anatolia, and Aeolian Argonautic elaborations.

Exploration of Aeolian foundation traditions and the localizing of such traditions in both the eastern Aegean and Magna Graecia, and of the reflexivity and reciprocality of Aeolian ethnic identity that these mythic traditions entail.

An examination of recent work on the archaeology of a Greek presence in Late-Bronze-Age Asia Minor and typological investigation of linguistic exclaves, remote language communities characterized by linguistic persistence.

The chapter first reviews hypotheses concerning the nature of ‘Milesian tales’. Harrison 1998 had proposed a modified version of Bürger 1992, suggesting that in this genre an anchor-narrator told of scabrous events in a quasi-ethnographic account of his visits to various places; Jennson 2004 had suggested that the Amores transmitted as Lucian’s pointed to Μιλησιακά in which the key-narrator recounted adventures that were both his own and told to him by others, i.e. just what we find Encolpius doing in the Satyrica; and Regine May had argued in 2010 that the prosimetric ass-papyrus P.Oxy. 4762 preserves part of Aristides’ Μιλησιακά, ‘Milesian Tales’. After noting these hypotheses the chapter briefly explores the impact of Μιλησιακά on the Greek novels. Finally it investigates their earlier history, suggesting that just as Sybaritica, ‘Sybaritic tales’, linked to them by Ovid, are shown by Aristophanes’ Wasps already to be a form of λόγοι, ‘stories’, circulating in the 420s BC, so too Μιλησιακοὶ λόγοι, ‘Milesian stories’, may have already been current in Athens by then, linked to Miletus’ fame as a provider of dildoes (cf. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata) and as Aspasia’s city of origin.

The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi offers an example of how an ancient cult site was transformed into a Panhellenic sanctuary as a result of political and military conflicts involving some of the leading city-states of the region. After the so-called First Sacred War in the 590s/80s BC, Delphi was launched as the center of the Greek world with its oracle and its Panhellenic games. The Doric style of the Apollo temple and other buildings on the site helped to communicate the ambitions and values of the amphictyony that was in charge of the administration of the sanctuary after the war. The standardization of architecture and sculpture was an important feature in the elite competition that took place in Panhellenic sanctuaries like Delphi, where cities from all over Greece set up costly treasuries and votive statues. Ionic monuments such as the sphinx of the Naxians alternated with Doric buildings. On the basis of recent scholarship, the Ionic order can be interpreted as a regional variation of the “Panhellenic” Doric order. As can be shown, the Ionic order corresponds with cultural values such as abundance, variety, multilingualism, and openness toward Near-Eastern and Egyptian influences that are also characteristic of Ionian poetry, philosophy, and culture.

A plethora of archaeological evidence retrieved from regional and panhellenic sanctuaries in Greece suggests that from the eighth century BCE and throughout the Archaic period sanctuaries functioned as seminal nodes of cultural interaction between Etruria and Anatolia. This chapter discusses evidence from Greek sanctuaries that functioned as arenas of actual physical contact and tangible or intangible exchanges between visitors from the Italic peninsula and visitors from Anatolia and proposes a heuristic classification of two major categories of sanctuaries: transactional, in which exchanges of an economic nature would have taken place, and heterotopic, in which some transactional exchanges may have been arranged or taken place but which mainly configured themselves as wondrous places only for very few and exclusive visitors seeking to enhance their prestige by simply being there. Contacts between Italics and Anatolians would have taken place in both transactional and heterotopic sanctuaries, while only the high, exclusive elites would have frequented the heterotopic sanctuaries.

In the Hellenistic period, cities were the cornerstones of imperial rule. Cities were the loci for the acquisition of capital and manpower, and imperial agents (philoi) were recruited for a large part among Greek civic elites. This chapter departs from the dual premise that premodern empires are negotiated enterprises and that they are often networks of interaction rather than territorial states. The relentless competition between three rival superpowers in the Hellenistic Aegean – the Seleukid, Ptolemaic and Antigonid Empires – gave cities a good bargaining position vis-à-vis these empires. The fact that the imperial courts were dominated by philoi from the Aegean poleis moreover meant that these cities held a central and privileged place in Hellenistic imperialism, and benefited greatly from it. Royal benefactions structured imperial-local interactions. They were instrumental in a complex of reciprocal gift-exchange between empires and cities. Empires most of all needed capital, loyalty and military support. As kings were usually short of funds, the gifts by which they hoped to win the support of cities against their rivals often came in the form of immaterial benefactions like the granting of privileges and the protection of civic autonomy.