Yeah, the wise men "from the east" are generally thought to have been from Persia (exactly where Mithraism is from). In traditional portraits, they try to establish the universality of Christianity by making each wise man represent a different race: You'll have a white one, a black one and an Asian one. In reality, though, they were not an inter-racial group of dudes. Just astrologers from Persia.

The Jews got a lot of stuff from their captivity from the Babylonian epoch and had a massive Persian influence. They got their concept of a priest-class from Persia. They adopted the skullcap from Persia, too.

It's called the "Middle" East for a reason. Because places like Palestine were smack-dab in the middle between two massive cultural magnetic poles: Greece and Persia.

From Greece, they probably nicked Solon (one of the wise men of Athens). This "philosopher-king" was noted for his wise sayings . . . just as "Solomon" later was. Note the similarity in name. The Book of Ecclesiastes was a crib from Greek stoic philosophy. Even the concept of the messiah came from Greece. (Jews wanted a Jewish Alexander.) It's why after Alexander died at the age of 33, the early Christian church rushed to claim that Jesus died at the age of 33. (They were trying to make connections between the two men.) Alexander's influence was so massive that the New Testament was written in Greek (not Hebrew or Aramaic.) And when archaeologists excavated Jerusalem from the time of Jesus 75% of the tombstones were written in Greek, not Aramaic.

They were thoroughly Hellenized.

And before that, they were thoroughly Persianized.

It's like the popular movie "The 300". The ancient world was a battlefield between Greeks and Persians. Most of the people in the middle were a hodgepodge of both influences.

• Footnote: Most ancient scholars think that certain tribes of Israel arrived in Palestine from the "People of the Sea" movement that created the Philistines. The Philistines were proto-Greeks. Their neighbors, the Israelite "Tribe of Dan," was the only maritime "tribe" of Israel (like the People of the Sea). Even their name appears to be proto-Greek. If you read the "Iliad" the proto-Greeks called themselves three things: Argives, Achaens and Danaans. The Tribe of Dan and the Danaans look suspiciously similar. So, at the very genesis of the "Israelite people," you had proto-Greeks involved. The same proto-Greeks who bred with aboriginal people and created the Philistines.