This volume forms the proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium of the Assyrian and Babylonian Intellectual Heritage Project held in Innsbruck in 2002. Twenty-nine specialist contributions focus on the economic aspects of the `diffusion and transformation of the cultural heritage of the ancient Near East'. Eight thematic sections discuss: Near Eastern economic theory; Mesopotamia in the third millenium BC; Mesopotamia and the Levant in the first half of the first millennium BC; Levant, Egypt and the Aegean world during the same time span; Greece and Achaemenids, Parthians, Sasanians and Rome; social aspects of this exchange, including its affects on religion, borders, education and cosmology. The scope of the papers is wide, with subjects including Babylonian twin towns and ethnic minorities, archaic Greek aristocrats, the Phoenicians and the birth of a Mediterranean society, slavery, Iron Age Cyprus, Seleucid coins, the `Silk Route', and Greek images of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms. Sixteen papers in English, the rest in German.