The Introduction sketched two fascinating conundrums in the study of Greek–Barbarian relationships. The first was the peculiar way in which Greek culture filtered its interaction with and debts to non-Greek cultures through the construction of a Barbarian repertoire. The second was the significant impact of Greek culture during the archaic and classical periods on many cultures and societies of the eastern Mediterranean. How are we to explain the fact that the Greek periphery influenced so deeply the much larger, older, wealthier and more powerful world of the empires of the East? Chapter 5 dealt with the first conundrum; this one will deal with the second. As the Introduction suggested, the best way to understand our conundrum is by situating it within the processes of globalisation and glocalisation in the ancient Mediterranean. We shall therefore examine how Greek culture was part of the processes of globalisation and how non-Greek communities around the Mediterranean glocalised various aspects of it in diverse ways. The following discussion of glocalisation and globalisation is largely focused on archaeological, numismatic and epigraphic evidence; the reason for this selection is not merely their intrinsic interest, but the fact that the non-Greek literatures of the archaic and classical periods have almost completely vanished, with the obvious exception of the Jewish texts included in the Old Testament.

The Hellenistic period starts with the wars between Alexander’s successors to divide the empire that he conquered and created. The result of these wars was the emergence of a number of states that stretched from the Balkans to modern Pakistan. The Hellenistic period traditionally encompasses the history of these empires and kingdoms from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 until the last of them, the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, succumbed to Rome after the battle of Actium in 31. We have seen how already during the archaic and classical periods Greek soldiers, professionals, intellectuals and artists had served the rulers, satraps and grandees of the empires of the East (pp. 43–52). But the radical difference between the Hellenistic and earlier periods is that now these Greeks were members of a Greco-Macedonian ruling elite; the new empires and kingdoms were ruled by Macedonians, and their courts consisted primarily of Macedonian and Greek military men, administrators, artists, intellectuals and professionals of various skills. For the first time Greeks had come to rule over non-Greeks. This was an important difference and one of the reasons for which the Hellenistic period is being examined separately in this final chapter, rather than being incorporated within the discussions of the previous chapters.

One of the major arguments of this book is the necessity of dissociating the history of the relationship between Greeks and non-Greeks from the context of modern Orientalism and the modern confrontation between West and East. This implies challenging the identification of the modern Western scholar and reader with the ancient Greeks, seen as the originators of freedom and science in their confrontation with despotic and religious-minded Orientals; but it also challenges the identification of Greek attitudes towards Barbarians with the imperialist and colonialist attitudes of the modern West. There is no doubt that from the point of view of reception, both the inspiration from Greek democracy and freedom as well as the denigration of Oriental despotism and luxury are part of the history of the modern world; accordingly, scholars who work on the interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks cannot ignore these modern discourses and debates when conducting their research. But the mapping of the modern distinction between West and East onto the ancient interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks is deeply flawed, because it is deeply unhistorical. The Greeks did not confront the cultures of the Near East from the same standpoint as the Western imperialist societies confronting the modern Orient. When we remember that more Greeks fought on the Persian side in 480 or in 334, that Lydian and Thracian rulers received honours at Panhellenic sanctuaries such as Delphi, that Persian satraps received Athenian citizenship, that Carian rulers spread the institutions of the Greek polis, or the saga of the Greco-Persian family of Artabazus, it becomes obvious that the interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks took place in a world that was infinitely more complex than any simplistic distinction between West and East.

A historical overview

Around 1000 bce the Mediterranean world gives a strongly parochial appearance. Within the Aegean, most people produced and consumed local products, with limited evidence for the exchange of goods, ideas and technologies across cultures; people mostly lived and died where they were born, there being little evidence for human mobility. This was not the primeval condition of a primitive world; it was the result of the breakdown of a highly interconnected Mediterranean world during the Late Bronze Age (1500–1200). There is no better illustration of the interconnectedness of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean than the bronze ingots in the shape of an oxhide, which can be found from Sardinia all the way to Cyprus and the Levant; the exchange of bronze had reached such levels that a standardised form in the shape of an oxhide was invented and widely adopted by various communities. But this was all gone by the year 1000 and the world looked radically different.

This image of a Mediterranean world of small, isolated communities was gradually modified. New networks moving people, goods, ideas and technologies were being established across the Mediterranean. Archaeology provides hard evidence for the movement of goods: by 800 Greek pottery could be found from the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean to Sardinia and southern Italy in the western Mediterranean; metal ware, jewellery, seals, vases and statuettes made of faience and alabaster produced by Syrian and Phoenician craftsmen were to be found in the Aegean as well as in the waters of the western Mediterranean. Alongside the mobility of goods there was also the mobility of ideas and technologies. Many areas of the Mediterranean had never known the technology of writing, while in the Aegean the syllabic Linear B script vanished with the end of the Bronze Age world; during the eighth century the technology of alphabetic writing expanded all over the Mediterranean through the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, which was subsequently adopted by other non-Greek cultures for their own languages (pp. 227–9). At the same time motifs, styles and iconographic elements from the artistic traditions of the Levant and northern Syria were being adopted and adapted in Greece as well as in the western Mediterranean. This mobility of goods, ideas and technologies was predicated on human mobility.

Chapters 2 and 3 have examined in detail the four parallel yet interconnected worlds within which interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks took place. The following three chapters will focus on the consequences of these parallel worlds for the social, economic, political and cultural history of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea during the archaic and classical periods. This chapter will focus on intercultural communication in the ancient Mediterranean: in what ways, in which contexts, and for what purposes did Greeks and non-Greeks attempt, succeed or fail to communicate, and what were the consequences of this intercultural communication? Because as historians we specialise in the study of particular cultures, we tend to believe that people within one culture think only in terms of their own culture; but intercultural communication poses very acute challenges to such a perspective. If one reads Egyptian texts and observes Egyptian images addressed to an Egyptian audience, the pharaoh was god on earth, on a level far above any other Egyptian, let alone non-Egyptian Barbarians; but the pharaohs who corresponded with other Near Eastern rulers and called them ‘my brother’ clearly had to think in very different terms when it came to intercultural communication.

Let us start by exploring some examples of intercultural encounters and some forms of intercultural communication in the ancient Mediterranean. We have already come across the Greek and Carian mercenaries who became an important factor in the political and military history of Saite Egypt; their presence at the Egyptian capital of Memphis is illustrated by some fascinating ‘bilingual’ grave stelae, dating from the seventh and sixth centuries (see Figure 16). These are stelae with two or more registers, which have been called bilingual because they combine registers decorated in typical Egyptian fashion with registers showing ekphora scenes which are typical of Greek art; they also carry inscriptions either in both hieroglyphic and Carian or only in Carian and rarely even in Greek.

Historiographies

Few topics in ancient history attract such wide attention as the relationship between Greeks and Barbarians. To mention just two recent Hollywood movies should be enough: Oliver Stone’s Alexander, on Alexander the Great’s overthrow of the Persian Empire and the conquest of various peoples in the East; and Frank Miller’s 300, on the battle of Thermopylae between the Greeks and the Persian Empire, were great commercial successes and created considerable cultural and political debates. But there are also few topics in ancient history that lead to such fundamental differences in scholarly approaches and views. On the one hand, there is a long-standing approach that focuses on polarity and conflict. The relationship between Greeks and Barbarians is seen as part of the wider distinction between West and East; the Greeks are the ancestors of the West, the people who invented democracy, freedom of thought, science, philosophy, drama and naturalistic art, and whose literary works stand as the foundation of Western literature; the world of the East, the world of the people whom the Greeks described as Barbarians, is a wholly different world, characterised by despotism and theocracy and the absence of all the Greek achievements. The confrontation of the Greeks with the Persian Empire was the fight to preserve these achievements and values that we still cherish, and should be seen as part of a perennial confrontation between West and East; back in 1846, John Stuart Mill expressed this view in a famous adage:

It is time to examine the second of the paradoxes we set out in the Introduction: the paradoxical nature of Greek participation in the processes of globalisation and glocalisation and their effects on Greek culture. Chapter 4 examined in detail the contexts, patterns and content of intercultural communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Intercultural communication involved practices, ideas and stories which were transmitted across cultures. A series of texts translated and recorded in the Hittite language of the second millennium are known as the Kumarbi cycle and deal with the topic of divine succession in heaven. The myths describe how the deity Anu is confronted by his cup-bearer Kumarbi and flees to heaven, but has his genitals bitten off and swallowed by Kumarbi. Kumarbi becomes divine ruler, but has three fearful deities inside his body as a result of swallowing Anu’s genitals. His attempt to prevent them from coming out fails after swallowing a rock, and the weather god Teshub emerges out of Kumarbi’s body and eventually succeeds him as ruler. It is obvious that a version of this myth has been transmitted through intercultural communication and further adapted in the succession myth narrated in Hesiod’s Theogony, where Cronus castrates Uranus, swallows his children and is finally defeated by his son, the weather god Zeus.

The interaction with the Persian Empire that we examined in Chapter 2 had obvious effects on Athenian culture. Through trade, gift-exchange and war spoils, Athenian potters came across metal vase forms popular in Persia, such as the handless vases in the form of an animal head, adopted the shape in clay, but adapted it to suit Greek drinking customs by adding handles and a foot. Another example is that of the parasol, a traditional status symbol for Near Eastern kings, who were often depicted served by parasol bearers in Assyrian or Persian art, which in the course of the first millennium was also adopted by the aristocracies of Asia Minor as a status symbol.

The Panhellenic world

Where should our account start? At which point in history does it become possible to talk of Greeks and Barbarians? Thucydides, a fifth-century Greek historian, thought he had an answer:

According to Thucydides, there existed no Greeks or Barbarians in the age of Homer: the words Hellas (Greece) and Hellenes (Greeks) were not used by the poet to describe collectively the countless Greek communities, and he had no term to describe collectively the non-Greek communities (Map 1). Modern historians have sometimes taken this ancient argument at face value and reconstructed the history of Greek identity and Greek–Barbarian relations on the basis of it. According to them, Greek identity was something that emerged gradually during the archaic period out of the multitude of diverse Greek communities. Some scholars tend to put the stress on the process of aggregation through which local and regional identities coalesced into the formation of a Greek identity: the role of genealogy, sanctuaries and festivals in creating this aggregation is seen as particularly important. Others stress the role of opposition to non-Greeks and the formation of the concept of the Barbarian as an essential aspect of the emergence of Greek identity: the Persian Wars are seen by these scholars as a key point in the formation of Greek identity.