Chapter 4 is in part an examination of a Mycenaean divine Potnia, one affiliated with the “labyrinth,” the Potnia of the dabúrinthos (δαβύρινθος). The labyrinthine space with which she is associated is an Asian cult notion introduced from Anatolia to Balkan Hellas. This chapter also examines the Rājasūya, a Vedic rite of consecration by which a warrior is made a king and a likely cult counterpart to the Mycenaean initiation of the wanaks.

Chapter 2 examines the Vedic sacrificial post called the yūpa and its role in ritual performances. A Mycenaean Greek cognate term and comparable ritual implement lies behind the Linear B form spelled u-po – that is, hûpos (ὗπος). Among other topics treated in this chapter are the Mycenaean deity called the po-ti-ni-ja, a-si-wi-ja, the Asian Potnia, and the u-po-jo po-ti-ni-ja, the Potnia of the u-po (that is, húpoio Pótnia [ὕποιο Πότνια]), a term matched exactly by Sanskrit patnī-yūpá-.

Chapter 6 examines Iranian cult and myth as evidenced in the Nart sagas of Transcaucasia, but also among Scythians as well as in Zoroastrian tradition, including the psychotropic cult substances Haoma (Iranian) and Soma (Indic). The Greek polis of Dioscurias in the Caucasus is explored as a place where Hellenic and Indo-Iranian divine-twin myth and cult affiliation meet, as indeed they do in the Pontic polis of Sinope. Aeolian connections are conspicuous at both locales.

Chapter 7 examines the sheep’s fleece filter used in the preparation of Soma. A cult ideology in which such an implement played an important role was preserved for some time in Iranian tradition in the Caucuses, ultimately giving expression to Greek ideas about the presence of fleecy filters impinged with gold in the vicinity of Dioscurias – rationalizing accounts of the Golden Fleece of Aeolian Argonautic tradition. Particular elements of the Golden Fleece myth find parallels in Indic poetic accounts of the performance of Soma cult. The common Hellenic and Indic elements constitute a shared nexus of ideas that earliest took shape in Bronze-Age communities of admixed Mycenaean and Luvian populations into which Mitanni Soma ideas had spread via Kizzuwatna. The Golden Fleece mythic tradition, with its geographic localization in Transcaucasia, is a Mycenaean Asianism that took shape in Asia Minor under Indic and Iranian influences and that continued to evolve among the Iron-Age Asian Greeks.

Chapter 5 considers the Indic divine twins, the Aśvins (Aśvínā), or Nāsatyas (Nā́satyā), their association with the Indic Dawn goddess Uṣas, and their place in the Indic Soma cult. Discussion then shifts to the kingdom of Mitanni in Syro-Mesopotamia, a place into which Indic culture was introduced as Indo-Iranian peoples migrated southward through Asia, as also at Nuzi. There is good lexical evidence for the presence of a Soma cult in Mitanni, and Soma-cult ideas appear to have spread out of Mitanni, through Kizzuwatna, into the Luvian milieu of western Asia Minor, where such ideas would almost certainly have been encountered by resident Mycenaean Greeks, intermingled biologically, socially, culturally, and linguistically with Luvian populations. With that spread certain elements of Soma-cult ideology were mapped onto Anatolian cult structures.

Chapter 1 examines Pylos tablet Tn 316 in depth, giving particular attention to the Linear B forms spelled po-re-na, po-re-si, and po-re-no-, and related Sanskrit forms, and to the especial closeness of post-Mycenaean Aeolic to ancestral Helleno-Indo-Iranian in regard to this matter.

Chapter 3 examines the Mycenaean wanaks and lāwāgetās, figures responsible for leading Mycenaean society in specific ways and who correspond notionally to figures implicit in Indic and Iranian social structures – figures who descend from still more ancient Indo-European antecedents charged with the task of leading society through the spaces of the Eurasian Steppes and in migrations southward out of the Steppes.

Chapter 8 explores how technologies can be used to imitate and challenge the gods. Lucian’s Icaromenippus is analysed first in terms of how the text reimagines divine and human realms as mechanically bridgeable, and then for the possible theomachic implications of the protagonist’s flight. Lucian’s Icaromenippus demonstrates that technologies are integral to navigating the junction between human and divine, but there are also hints that this can be manipulated in ways that pose threats to the existing divine order. The suggestion that Menippus’ actions mark him out as a pseudo or fake god provides a useful entry point for discussion of the issue of technology as a tool for theomachy more generally in the Greek cultural imagination including in figures like Salmoneus.

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.

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.

Moving from the Camp Grant massacre, this chapter addresses the question of narratives on violent events such as wars, more specifically the Trojan War in the Homeric epic. Human and Divine names are part of a complex system of signs which guide the audience. The case study of Euryopa Zeus – that is, a god who has a ‘Vast Voice’ and an ‘Ample Sight’ – provide a divine portrait of the overarching authority in matters of war and destiny. The chapter also suggests a network of divine powers who share specific aptitudes, such as Athena, Hera and Hermes, between distance and proximity, control and empathy.

The first occurrences of the onomastic formula ‘Zeus Helios great Sarapis’ belongs to the reign of Trajan. Appearing in the military and economic context of the quarries of the Egyptian eastern desert, this divine name associates, in a single henotheistic entity, the great gods of Egypt (Amon-Ra-Helios), the Greco-Roman world (Zeus-Iuppiter) and Alexandria (Sarapis), giving pre-eminence to the latter. The iconographic translation of this theological evolution can be found in the provincial coinage of Alexandria during the Antonine period.

The epilogue charts a return to the earliest Greek poets on record, Homer and Hesiod, and a discussion of how these poets used monumentality to depict matter shaping time.

This chapter examines the Derveni papyrus and compares its hermeneutics to exegetic techniques found in cuneiform texts. The analysis shows that the anonymous author of the papyrus operates with semantic and theological models that align with ideas expressed in Akkadian texts, particularly those ideas relating to theonyms and the evolution of the cosmos. As in some Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the author makes use of hermeneutic techniques that heavily rely on morphological analysis aiming to prove that divine names have a unified referent. This referent is a polyonymous cosmic god, Nous (Mind), which has the same characteristics of the Babylonian gods Ninurta and Marduk when represented as universalizing divinities of multiple names.

“The Dioskouroi in Existential Crisis,” deals with Nemean 10 and its extended mythical narrative. That myth is an aitiology of the entry of Kastor and Polydeukes into immortality, framed as a choice made by Polydeukes between claiming immortality for himself or sharing both mortality and immortality with his brother. I argue that Pindar’s epinician aitiology intervenes in and revalues enduring ambiguities surrounding the relationship of the Dioskouroi to mortality and immortality by valorizing Polyedeukes’ perspective, which privileges the parameters of mortal experience. This case study emphasizes the resonances evoked by the structure of the ode itself between the disorientation of the Dioskouroi from mortal experience and from the surrounding contexts of the ode.

The cholos which is one of the constitutive features of Hera is at the heart of this chapter, which treats the narratives and traditions which recount conflicts involving the Hera of Zeus and certain of Zeus’s sons (e.g. Herakles, Dionysos, Hephaistos), and where her wrath is decisive for the definition of their divine prerogatives and their full integration into the Olympian order. By challenging some of Zeus’s illegitimate children, Hera works as a power of legitimation, redefining the divine family. In the world of heroes, the angry Hera is an agent of legitimation as well, but also of delegitimation, especially in cases of human sovereignty: her intervention contributes to identifying rulers whose sovereignty is rotten, as is the case with the royal family of Thebes under Oedipus, and that of Iolkos, in the epic of the Argonauts. Her interventions are nothing but actions that take charge of and realise the boulai of all the gods collectively and of her husband in particular. She does this, to be sure, in her own way, as a goddess whose characteristic is constructive opposition, but her anger remains, in the final analysis, at the service of an order guaranteed by Zeus.

This chapter analyses the narrative traditions of the archaic period and assesses some of the later echoes and survivals of these traditions. In this material Hera appears in her complex role as wife, queen, and angry goddess against the backdrop of her constitutive relation to Zeus, the divine sovereign. By analysing the connections between these three elements, it attempts to gain an inside understanding of the goddess’s wrath and its implications. Questions of rank and legitimacy, the theme of childbirth, and that of filiation are also an integral part of her prerogatives as Olympian queen. Hera is the ultimate spouse but also the intimate enemy of the king of the gods. These aspects are indissociable, and it is significant that the Greeks chose for Zeus not a submissive spouse but a genuine partner endowed with a strong sense of competitiveness and a rank comparable to his. Their preferred image is of a sovereign couple bound together in a dynamic of conflict in which disagreements and reconciliations, separations and reunions alternate. That Hera defies Zeus and sets traps for him shows how close she is to her royal husband and that she knows him better than anyone else.

This chapter deals with local narrative traditions and the ritual acts associated with local sanctuaries (to the extent to which these can be fruitfully investigated) of Hera, whose cult titles Teleia and Basileia echo how she is portrayed in the archaic epic poetry. This is notably the case at Argos, Samos, and Perachora, where important sanctuaries of the goddess are located outside the city centre, but also in Olympia, ‘the Olympus on earth’, where the first monumental temple of the Panhellenic sanctuary of Zeus is associated with her. Her cults in Plataia, Delos, Lesbos, Corinth, Athens, and western Greece shows how her roles of spouse and sovereign overlap and to some extent come to be confused because of her complex relation to Zeus. This relation is crucial to understanding the expectations of Hera’s worshippers, although in a certain number of places the connection with Zeus is not made fully explicit.