This broad survey of select Aegean islands and the Greek-speaking coast of western Anatolia reviews the revival of settlements in these areas, after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Opening and closing with the imagined vision of this world in Homeric epic, the survey traces the evolution of regional styles in art and architecture, linked to independent polities that developed patterns in self-government that became the Greek polis. Early Iron Age sites, tombs, and artifacts from Euboea, the Cyclades, East Greek islands, the Dodecanese and the mainland areas of Aeolis, Ionia, and Caria are examined against the mythological paradigms of migration and Greek colonization; these regions demonstrate widespread continuity behind the later legends of a wave of Hellenism, and enjoyed close and fertile contacts with neighboring Anatolian cultures such as Phrygia and Lydia. Such relationships fostered innovations in the Archaic period such as the first monumental temples and sculptures in marble, and the evolution of poetic genres, among island and coastal entrepreneurs in collaboration (as well as conflict) with a succession of inland empires, until the Ionian revolt against Achaemenid Persia.