Tridents and bidents appear to have been used in early Italy as symbols of divinatory power associated with lightning and are known by the evidence of rare representations and actual metal objects placed in Italic rulers’ tombs of the eighth through the seventh centuries BCE (Golasecca and Etruria). Fragile or even deliberately blunted, these implements could really only be symbolic emblems, and two show evidence of intense destruction during the funerary ritual. A possibly analogous situation, with deeper roots in the Near East (especially Assyria, Urartu, and the Levant) may also have occurred in Anatolia, especially Phrygia (Gordion). A trident planted in the earth may have symbolized divination.

In the 1950s, University of Pennsylvania archaeologists recovered over fifty pieces of wooden furniture from three royal tumulus burials and the city mound at Gordion, Turkey. Tumuli MM and P (eighth century BCE) contained thirteen tables and three serving stands with characteristic Phrygian features. The style and joinery of the tables tie them to a long trajectory of wooden tables from the ancient Near East. A variety of fine wooden objects was found in two tombs excavated in 1972 at Verucchio in northern Italy (late eighth through early seventh centuries BCE). The finds from tombs 85 and 89 include wood tables, footstools, thrones, boxes, and other organic materials. Three tables from tomb 85 had legs attached to the table top with a version of the collar-and-tenon joinery used for the Gordion tables. Rarely are ancient wooden artifacts recovered in good condition; the finds from Verucchio and Gordion provide a large and important corpus from the early first millennium BCE. This paper examines the similarities (and differences) between Gordion and Verucchio wooden furniture and investigates the possibility of interaction between Near Eastern and Italic woodworking schools in the eighth through the seventh centuries BCE.

The chapter discusses the position of Greek within the Indo-European family. Special attention is paid to innovations shared by all Greek dialects, which allows us to reconstruct Proto-Greek, and to the internal subgrouping of Greek. As for external subgrouping, the similarities of Greek with Macedonian, Phrygian and Armenian are evaluated, and the (unfortunately meagre) evidence for the exact place of Greek within the Indo-European family is discussed.