The chapter studies the destruction of Miletos by the Persians in 494 B.C. and its subsequent recovery by analyzing the literary and archaeological evidence, as well as by weighing the role of the countryside.

Although Egypt in the fifth century was highly integrated into the empire, it also began to develop new elements of distinctiveness. In part this trend resulted from divisions in theology and church politics that emerged around the Council of Chalcedon in 451, leading to deep splits in the church by the middle of the sixth century and the creation of competing church hierarchies. The native Egyptian language came to have its own literature and began to be used more widely in official contexts. At the same time, Alexandria remained a vibrant center of Greek culture, which permeated the rest of Egypt as well. The economic and social elite of the cities, increasingly closely tied to the imperial administration, concentrated wealth and power in their hands to a degree not seen earlier, even as most of the population continued to live in villages and work the land.

Chapter 3 treats Herodotus’ use of the catalogue and the general problem of quantifying goods on a large cultural scale, as well as the specific use of the list as a cipher for imparting value. In the Histories, I argue, the genre of historiography and the nascent administrative inventory tradition coalesce. We find multiple examples of lists used to prove points and express value, and the characters and audience of the Histories, deeply invested in quantifying and displaying their wealth and possessions, use the list format to enact and prove their own worth. Meanwhile, Herodotus’ use of the term apodeixis for his work — also the technical word for an inscribed inventory — reveals that he conceives of his project as a grand multimedia catalogue of everything of importance to the Greek world. He has transferred the discrete uses of lists available to him to his own new type of text, thus incorporating old forms while distinguishing the Histories from previous genealogical works.

Alexander the Great's victories over Darius III and his satraps between 334 and 323 BCE have been for very long interpreted as the reliable testimony of the intrinsic feebleness and internal fragility of the Achaemenid empire, which expanded from Central Asia to Aswan and from the Indus to the Mediterranean Sea, and lasted for more than two centuries (c.550–330). And yet, notwithstanding the exceptional cultural and political diversity of the countries and peoples under the empire’s rule, the central authorities exercised a permanent control upon lands and seas. The best way for understanding the originality of such an ancient empire is to rule out the usual tricky alternative centralization versus independence/autonomy. Cultural diversity and imperial power are not mutually exclusive. The main feebleness of such a political construction was that, in front of a powerful (Macedonian) invasion, the central power could not count on any imperial ideology which would be shared by all the cultural components of the empire.

This chapter explores the dynamics of ancient cross-cultural interactions via a case study from the Severan period. Aelian’s brief narrative of the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamos is a story that connects four cultural traditions: Chaldean, Persian, Greek, and Roman. Included in Book 12 of the De natura animalium, the story tells how the Babylonian king’s fear of being usurped led him to imprison his daughter, who secretly gave birth to a son, Gilgamos, by a man of no distinction. Palace guards threw the baby from the acropolis of Babylon, whereupon the infant Gilgamos was rescued by an eagle. Ostensibly the story celebrates the eagle’s capacity for philanthropia, or devotion to humans, but Aelian is up to much more, as the Gilgamos tale opens up questions of cultural legitimacy, the need for evidentiary proof of belonging, and even the role of writing in the complex processes of cultural transformation. Aelian ultimately rejects legitimacy conferred by nature and opts instead for the adoption even of what is illegitimate, untrue, or unverifiable if it represents a valuable medium of cultural interconnectivity.