This paper is forthcoming in Collins, B. J./Bachvarova, M./ Rutherford, I. (eds.), Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors (Oxford, Oxbow 2007), 193Ð203.

It was once believed that Lydia was a crucial intermediary for the Greek importation of Near Eastern cultural artefacts, that Sardis was “un vaste champ d’études, un merveilleux foyer d’inspiration”. But growing archeological evidence has led many scholars to see in the wide-ranging Greco-Levantine maritime routes a more general and efficient explanation for the circulation of orientalia both in the Late Bronze Age and the later Orientalizing Epoch (c.750–650). Lydia has thus come to be regarded as somewhat backward and provincial, learning more from the Greeks than the reverse; the two usual examples are the alphabet and the orientalizing style in pottery, which appear in Lydia somewhat later than other parts of the Aegean. Here I shall attempt to rehabilitate the older view by arguing that, with the accession (coup?) of Gyges and his revamping of the Royal Court in the early seventh century, we may detect a sudden spike of Mesopotamian influence on the culture of the Lydian elite, due to the Mermnads’ emulation of Assyrian court life. Sardis was thus able to make a unique contribution to Archaic Greek orientalism through a continuous, focused infusion of classical Mesopotamian art and learning into the Greco-Lydian, and thence wider Greek, world. Interestingly, rather extensive evidence for this phenomenon emerges in the musical sphere, and this has important implications for the nature of Archaic Greek lyric. (Naturally, the Greco-Lydian musical movement must have involved a strong local Anatolian element; but this dimension I shall consider in a separate publication.)

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