innovators, but they could never have made the progress they did without adopting many of their skills, ideas, and practices from their non-Greek neighbors. It has become a new orthodoxy that the Greeks were very similar to their ancient Near Eastern neighbors in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia, and Asia Minor. Some scholars have gone so far as to ask whether the Greeks came up with anything new at all, or whether they merely acted as a conduit through which the
