Foreign influences and local tradition in the Iron Age pottery production from Arslantepe. Evidence from the new excavations of the Neo-Hittite levels

Foreign influences and local traditions have always tended to merge in the upper Euphrates valley. The assimilation by the local communities of several cultural elements originating in different Anatolian territories is characteristic of the history of this area. A key role has been played by the river, both in connecting and isolating "cultural groups". The Euphrates was a political and cultural border between the Hittite State and the peoples of the eastern plain during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC and between Neo-Hittite principalities and Urartian and Assyrian empires in the first part of the 1st millennium BC