This paper compares how ideas of power, rank, and status were communicated in Etruria and Anatolia in the Orientalizing period by the use of material items and images. By employing and exhibiting specific objects, elites used a non-verbal language to communicate with each other across frontiers in the Mediterranean area as well as to show their wealth and their sophistication in their own surroundings. Trade networks have been discovered, analyzed, and exhibited on various occasions in the last decade. However, we now have to deal with the significance of the selection, collection, and use of certain luxury items to the ostentation of accumulated wealth that are better known from the courtly societies of the Near and Middle East. The desire for possessing these items can be perceived in personal or private as well as social terms. As many of the items belong to the sphere of banqueting, it is mandatory to link the two worlds in question vis-à-vis this praxis of consumption and social events.

The inner part of South Etruria and several parts of Anatolia are characterized by impressive rock tombs and monuments. The highest concentration in Anatolia is found in Lycia and neighboring Caria, but they are documented also in Pamphylia, Pisidia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, Paphlagonia-Pontus, and Urartu, ranging in date from the ninth through the eighth centuries BCE to the Roman period, with a remarkable concentration between the fourth century and the Hellenistic period. There is a rich variety in typology, architecture, and decoration, and in some cases also function. In Etruria the phenomenon of rock tombs is documented mainly from the second quarter of the sixth century to the early second century BCE in the areas of Tuscania, San Giuliano, Blera, Norchia, Castel d’Asso, and Sovana, and includes tombs of cube, house, porticus, temple, aedicula, and tholos types. But there are other rock monuments, such as altars, thrones, and stepped monuments. This chapter discusses both the main common elements and the many differences between Etruscan and Anatolian rock tombs and monuments, examining position, chronology, typology, architecture, decoration, function, and death cult.

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.

Similarities in the imagery of Etruscan and Western Anatolian dress fashions, such as pointed shoes and Ionic chitons, indicate an obvious connection between the clothing systems of the two cultures. Indeed, Larissa Bonfante (2003) in her groundbreaking book Etruscan Dress classifies an “Ionian Phase” (550–475 BCE) in the development of the Etruscan clothing system. This chapter investigates the adaptation of Ionian dress items into the Etruscan dress repertoire through a comparative iconographic study of dress fashions in western Anatolia and Etruscan funerary art of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. After an overview of prevailing dress fashions in both cultures, it explores the specific case of shoes with upturned toes (Etruscan/Hittite shoes, as they are commonly known) to show the changing meanings and cultural connections the adopted dress items conveyed.

The relationship between Etruria and Anatolia has been an important topic since Herodotus asserted a Lydian origin for the Etruscans. Seen as the first civilization within the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans held a pivotal place in Italian history, and therefore their origin has held larger political implications for the modern peoples of Italy and Anatolia. This chapter contrasts the historiography of the term “Orientalizing” within Etruria with the evolving presentation of the history of civilization in Ottoman and later Turkish Anatolia. The term “Orientalizing” was a project in orientalism, defining the beginning of Western civilization as it was born from earlier Eastern civilizations, and its historic explanations were used for nationalistic ends. In addition, modern colonialism shaped how Eastern influence in Etruria was conceptualized and guided Italian archaeological missions in the Aegean. In Italy and Anatolia, understandings of their ancient interactions have been influenced by modern political ideologies that sought to assert where civilization originated and how it spread throughout Europe.

Cultural diplomacy was a central plank of the Attalid campaign to secure an empire. Yet the nuances of Attalid cultural politics and the dynasty’s own cultural hybridity remain poorly understood. Intellectuals associated with the Library of Pergamon, such as Polemon of Ilion and Demetrios of Skepsis, promulgated a distinctly Pergamene vision of the Panhellenic community, which emphasized the primacy of place and the cultural parity of East Greece. Demetrios provided learned support for the Attalid claim to the mantle of Priam of Troy and a kingdom of cis-Tauric Asia. That the Attalids sought to present themselves as Anatolian kings is also evident in their choice of the tumulus as a tomb type and in the form of urbanism evinced in their royal capital. By design, Pergamene cultural universalism was not only Panhellenic but also Pan-Asian: in a founding myth, victory over the Galatians secured Attalid Asia. However, a different playbook was required to draw urbanizing Pisidians or Phrygian temple dependents away from Galatian and Bithynian rivals and into the Attalid fold.

The cautious conversion of the kings of Ḥimyar to monotheism in the fourth century CE was influenced by the beliefs of a local Jewish community. This chapter clarifies the relationship between South Arabian Jews and Jewish sympathizers and offers an interpretative framework for the monotheism of fourth- and fifth-century Ḥimyar, which contextualizes the choice of South Arabia’s elites to become Jewish sympathizers. The process of conversion to monotheism also shares features with the first stage of Christianity in Aksūm and the Graeco-Roman world, as well as the henotheism of pre-Islamic North Arabia. It argues that the Ḥimyarite kings’ cautious conversion follows a broad Late Antique trend which aimed to ease the transition for their subjects and/or to assume a neutral position towards the developments of the surrounding empires. In the brand-new kingdom of Ḥimyar, the cult of a single, institutionalized and translocal deity provided a strong mechanism for establishing identities that were reshaped in a wider syncretistic framework through a sociopolitical exploitation of cults characteristic of the broader late antique world.

The concluding chapter pulls the various strands together and answers one final question: what made the Arabian milieu capable of producing Scripture of such universal appeal as the Qur’ān?

In the sunny, austere central hall of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, wrapping around the room’s walls like a serpent, then rising halfway to the ceiling on marble steps, stands a strident, if also fragmentary statement of empire. It is an unfinished wedding cake of a building. Tourists recline languidly on its ascent, like guests with nowhere to sit. The room is just too small; it is overtaken by the object on display: the Great Altar of Pergamon. The Altar, with its two sculptural friezes, the outer depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants, the inner, the tale of Telephos, son of Herakles and heroic ancestor of the Attalid dynasty, was discovered in 1871, the year in which the Second German Empire was born. The engineer Karl Humann stumbled upon the marble fragments while building infrastructure for Ottoman Turkey, making the Altar as we know it a pure product of German, French, and British competition for influence in the Middle East. Today, Turkey has regained confidence, and officials from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation expect Ankara to ask for it back.