Chapters 5 and 6 explored the social roles that stone vessels played over the third and earlier second millennia, a time in which different regions of the eastern Mediterranean were brought into increasingly frequent contact. Such entanglement became even more intense in the later LBA as privileged groups consumed a range of international exotica that were contextualised differently in different communities but nevertheless possessed a widespread currency as status markers. Two major developments at either end of the geographic zone under consideration here provide particularly relevant background to the following discussion. First, the campaigns of Thutmosis III brought large areas of the Levant under Egyptian control or influence. Ideologically, these conquests were part of a long tradition of smiting the amu, but this time their political and cultural impact was far more profound. The material result was a more permanent Egyptian political interest in the Levantine kingdoms, a flood of war booty into Egypt and, more gradually, an increased demand for and sensitivity to a range of foreign material culture. The second, roughly contemporary development was the destruction of most of the Cretan palaces and with them the disappearance of many of the chief components of Neopalatial material culture. At Knossos, an important palatial centre persisted after these destructions and continued to produce stone vessels, challenging us to makes sense of evidence for both continuity and disjuncture.