The Syrian and the Anatolian: Cultural and political frontiers in the post-Hittite Eastern Mediterranean (ca. 1200-700 BCE)

Throughout the Bronze Age, Anatolia and Syria had been deeply connected by an intense cultural and political exchange channeled by the Taurus mountains. However, after the collapse of the Hittite empire and the beginning of the Iron Age, regions on the two sides of the Taurus developed independent socio-cultural networks with limited interaction. This broad separation is generally overlooked in past research because obscured by the common cultural background that Iron Age Syro-Anatolian polities mostly inherited from the Hittite period. Warning against conceptualizations of Iron Age Syro-Anatolia as a coherent cultural complex, this paper intends to show that a “Taurus divide” affected various spheres of interaction, ranging from the cultural and linguistic landscapes to the worldviews shaping political practices of Syro-Anatolian polities. I will also argue that this divide found expression in the Assyrian “mental maps” of the area.