At first glance, the burial beds and couches in many Etruscan tombs look very similar to those found in Lydia, Phrygia, and other parts of Anatolia. Closer inspection reveals striking correspondence of formal details like carved headrests while at the same time highlighting essential differences of arrangement and usage. Iconographic evidence for beds and couches in Etruscan funerary art (tomb paintings and relief cippi) also shows a distinctive Etruscan approach to covering these furnishings with textiles. While the formal similarities do indicate that Etruscan and Anatolian elites knew and used shared furniture styles, they cannot be used to support theories of migration or cultural influence from Anatolia to Etruria since most of the Etruscan examples are earlier than the Anatolian parallels. Key differences in usage further remind us that even with a shared vocabulary of form, distinct cultural dialects can persist.

Relations between different regions of Anatolia and Etruria show main movements from east to west, but they also reveal some objects going the other way, from west to east. Exchange was made in several ways, including trade in goods and substances as well as immigration of skilled workers. The idea of a monumental funerary landscape developed in Etruria, probably influenced by North Syria or Anatolia. Tomb- and vase-painting show intense East Greek activity in Etruria, and East Greeks returning home brought goods from Etruria and gifted them as votive offerings to divinities: Bucchero – the national Etruscan pottery – has been found at Miletus and Samos, and Etruscan wine amphoras have been found at Miletus and Phocaea. Through East Greek cities (especially Miletus), Etruscan bucchero also arrived at the northern Black Sea coast. Such imports show that Etruscan goods were appreciated in East Greece and that some reflections of their knowledge may be identified in Greek and non-Greek handcraft. In Anatolia Etruscans also had connections with other non-Greek peoples, such as Lydians, and Lydian imports are known in Etruria.

This book is concerned with a region, and a regional culture, which in antiquity neither formed a distinct political unit nor served as a focus of local identity; the region is therefore designated with an invented name, ‘Hieradoumia’. The boundaries of Hieradoumia in time and space are defined on the basis of a distinctive shared set of commemorative practices. The institutional history of the region in the pre-Roman period is described in detail, with emphasis on the unusual political organization of the region in the later Hellenistic period into two large federal associations of villages (the koinon of the Maionians in the Katakekaumene and the dēmos of the Mysoi Abbaitai). The polis was a late and marginal development in Hieradoumia, and the village continued to be the primary focus of local identity and loyalty down to the end of antiquity. The difficulty of disentangling ethnically Lydian, Mysian, Macedonian, Phrygian, and Greek elements in the region’s population and cultural practices is emphasized.

The Greek world from ca. 750 onwards saw the establishment of wealthy elites, the widespread use of chattel and other slaves, and the occupation of new territories across the Mediterranean, all of which laid the groundwork for later developments. Elite property owners exploited the labour of the free poor, thereby adding to their own surpluses while keeping levels of consumption in the wider community minimal and archaeologically invisible. Only when and where social unrest or outright civil war led to restrictions on exploitation, and when new trading opportunities emerged around 600, did a middling class begin to establish itself, and to create demand for a range of staples that they could not produce themselves. In the late sixth century, the economic and social structure of the classical Greek world took shape, as regional and local specialisation and trade networks reached a level that enabled significant – if unquantifiable – per capita growth. Not all parts of the Greek world shared equally in these developments. Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly retained a polarised social structure of leisured elite and slave workers and continued to aim at agricultural self-sufficiency, institutionalising key features of the old predatory regimes that other Greeks were leaving behind.

Following unsuccessful attempts to keep the descendants of Nebuchadnezzar II on the throne, the usurper Nabonidus became king. Persian tribes had moved into Elamite lands, and the Medes made Harran a dangerous city; Nabonidus‘ mother, an aged acolyte of Ashurbanipal, resided there. His lengthy inscriptions are informative about his deeds and his character. He dedicated his daughter to the Moon-god at Ur according to precedent, and spent ten years in Arabia, leaving his son Belshazzar in charge in Babylon. He returned and restored the temple in Harran. Cyrus the Great brought his rule to an end, but continued to employ some high officials. Cyrus was probably of mixed Elamite and Persian descent. The Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform for a Babylonian audience, used traditional denigration of the previous king Nabonidus, and acknowledged Marduk as Babylon’s god. In another cuneiform text, Nabonidus was mocked for his scholarly pretensions and for sacrilegious acts. Babylon continued to be the centre where all subsequent kings felt obliged to celebrate the New Year festival to be accepted as legitimate rulers. Old monuments were not defaced. Cyrus may have been responsible for an imitation of Babylon’s glazed bricks at Persepolis. He made his son Cambyses co-regent.