The dissertation analyses the reliefs and paintings on thirty-one different tombs in Western Anatolia erected between 600 and 450 BC, in order to illuminate the ways in which non-Greek elites were identified on their memorials. The tombs from three areas are treated: Phrygia, Hellespontine Phrygia and Lydia, where the primary language groups were Phrygian, Mysian and Lydian. There is little literary evidence for these regions, and what there is tends to focus on political developments. Descriptions of people and society are few, and tend to represent them from an outside perspective, grouping them according to cultural characteristics which differentiate them from Greeks. It is clear, however, that the regions were important, prosperous places, controlled by illustrious grandees and land marked with a relatively high proportion of monumental tombs. Of these monumental tombs, there is a relatively high number decorated with striking and articulate images. There is much to be gained from examining the images on these tombs, as ‘indigenous’ sources for how elite Western Anatolians described themselves. Previous approaches to the tombs and their images have tended to look at them individually or in smaller groups, and to concentrate on the transmission and reception of Persian and Greek culture in the Achaemenid provinces. This dissertation contributes a broader comparative study of the decorated tombs, focussing on the kinds of statuses the images represent and the cultural forms these took. By comparing the various methods of self-representation, it clarifies patterns of identities in Western Anatolia and their relationship to historical circumstances. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. An introduction outlines the scope and sample, the historical background, previous studies of the monuments, the definition of ‘identity’ and the methods of analysis adopted here. Three case study chapters present the regions and the decorated monuments within them. A concluding chapter synthesises three aspects: social identities (roles and spheres of life represented); geographic and chronological patterns; and cultural affiliations and orientations. The dissertation concludes that a tension between Persian identities and local traditions is evident in some of the tomb images, which relates to the political upheavals in Western Anatolia and the Aegean at the time of the Persian Wars.

The contextual study of the oriental imports and their local imitations discovered in the Early Iron Age cemeteries at Knossos is of great importance, as it reveals the attitude of the Knossian society towards imports coming from the Near East during a period that lasted more than four centuries. Another important part of this study is a coherent analysis of the distribution of the fully published tombs and cemeteries. The main argument of this thesis is that there were different elite groups at Knossos which were in competition with each other and, for this reason, used different clusters of tombs and/or cemeteries. It is argued that the oriental imports and their close copies were used by those different elite groups in order to mark political and ideologies differences. / El estudio contextual de las importaciones orientales y sus imitaciones producidas en Creta, descubiertas en los cementerios de la Edad del Hierro temprana de Cnosós, es de gran importancia porque nos revela cómo la sociedad de Cnosós reaccionó a las importaciones procedentes de Oriente Próximo durante un período que duró más de cuatro siglos. Otra parte importante de este estudio es un análisis coherente de la distribución de las tumbas y los cementerios cuyos datos han sido publicados en su totalidad y su asociación con las importaciones. El argumento principal de esta tesis es que hubo distintos grupos de élite que competían unos con otros y por eso utilizaron tumbas y cementerios distintos. Estos grupos también utilizaron las importaciones orientales y sus imitaciones con el fin de marcar sus diferencias, políticas e ideológicas.