The volume publishes over 20 papers given at an international conference of the same name held in Innsbruck in January 2009 to celebrate the 60th birthday of Christoph Ulf. The main focus of the conference was discussion of and responses to his paper 'Rethinking Cultural Contacts' (Ancient West East 8 2009], 81-132 - reproduced as Appendix 1 in this volume). Ulf's paper offered a model outlining the various forms of cultural contact and sought to explain how and why foreign goods and ideas were taken on and to what extent they were changed in shape and meaning. Just as it was no longer tenable to think of cultural contacts without taking into account the whole chain of exchange - producer, transmitter and recipient - then cultural exchange as a meaningful process of the exchange of goods and ideas between all people involved required an approach, hitherto lacking, by which it can be comprehensively analysed and explained. The contributors are ancient historians, classical archaeologists, philologists and Near Eastern specialists, thus providing a variety of perspectives on cultural exchange in the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East.