Sardis or Sardes was an ancient city at the location of modern Sart in Turkey's
Manisa Province. Sardis was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, one of
the important cities of the Persian Empire, the seat of a proconsul under
the Roman Empire, and the metropolis of the province Lydia in later Roman and
Byzantine times. As one of the Seven churches of Asia, it was addressed by
the author John of the Book of Revelation in the Holy Bible in terms
which seem to imply that its population was notoriously soft and fainthearted.
Its importance was due, first to its military strength, secondly to its
situation on an important highway leading from the interior to the Aegean
coast, and thirdly to its commanding the wide and fertile plain of the Hermus.
Geography Sardis was situated in the middle of
Hermus valley, at the foot of Mount Tmolus, a steep and lofty spur which
formed the citadel. It was about 4 kilometres south of the Hermus. Today,
the site is located by the present day village of Sart, near Salihli in the
Manisa province of Turkey, close to the Ankara - İzmir highway from İzmir). The
part of remains including the bath-gymnasium complex, synagogue and
Byzantine shops is open to visitors year-round.
History The earliest reference to Sardis is in
the The Persians of Aeschylus; in the Iliad, the name Hyde seems to be given
to the city of the Maeonian chiefs, and in later times Hyde was said to be the
older name of Sardis, or the name of its citadel. It is, however, more probable
that Sardis was not the original capital of the Maeonians, but that it became so
amid the changes which produced the powerful Lydian empire of the 8th
century BC. The city was captured by the Cimmerians
in the 7th century BC, by the Persians in the 6th, by the Athenians in the 5th,
and by Antiochus III the Great at the end of the 3rd century BC. In the
Persian era, Sardis was conquered by Cyrus the Great and formed the end
station for the Persian Royal Road which began in Persepolis, capital of Persia.
During the Ionian Revolt, the Athenians burnt down the city. Sardis remained
under Persian domination until it surrendered to Alexander the Great in
334 BC. The early Lydian kingdom was very
advanced in the industrial arts and Sardis was the chief seat of its
manufactures. The most important of these trades was the manufacture and
dyeing of delicate woolen stuffs and carpets. The stream Pactolus which
flowed through the market-place "carried golden sands" in early antiquity, which
was in reality gold dust out of Mount Tmolus. It was during the reign of King
Croesus that the metallurgists of Sardis discovered the secret of separating gold
from silver, thereby producing both metals of a purity never known before.
This was an economic revolution, for while gold nuggets panned or mined were
used as currency, their purity was always suspect and a hindrance to trade.
Such nuggets or coinage were naturally occurring alloys of gold and silver
known as electrum and one could never know how much of it was gold and how
much was silver. Sardis now could mint nearly pure silver and gold coins, the
value of which could be—and was—trusted throughout the known world. This
revolution made Sardis rich and Croesus' name synonymous with wealth itself. For
this reason, Sardis is famed in history as the place where modern currency was
invented. Disaster came to the great city under
the reign of the emperor Tiberius, when in AD 17, Sardis was destroyed by an
earthquake, but it was rebuilt funded entirely from its own wealth. It was one
of the great cities of western Asia Minor until the later Byzantine period.
Later, trade and the organization of commerce continued to be sources of
great wealth. After Constantinople became the capital of the East, a new
road system grew up connecting the provinces with the capital. Sardis then
lay rather apart from the great lines of communication and lost some of its
importance. It still, however, retained its titular supremacy and continued to
be the seat of the metropolitan bishop of the province of Lydia, formed in AD
295. It was enumerated as third, after Ephesus and Smyrna, in the list of
cities of the Thracesion thema given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th
century. However, over the next four centuries it was in the shadow of the
provinces of Magnesia-upon-Sipylum and Philadelphia, which retained their
importance in the region. After 1071 the Hermus valley began to
suffer from the inroads of the Seljuk Turks but the Byzantine general John
Doukas reconquered the city in 1097, the successes of the general Philokales in
1118 relieved the district from later Turkish pressure and the ability of the
Comneni dynasty together with the gradual decay of the Seljuk Sultanate of
Rum meant that it remained under Byzantine dominion. When Constantinople
was taken by the Venetians and Franks in 1204 Sardis came under the rule of the
Byzantine Empire of Nicea. However once the Byzantines retook Constantinople in
1261, Sardis with the entire Asia Minor was neglected and the region eventually
fell under the control of Ghazi emirs, the Cayster valleys and a fort on the
citadel of Sardis was handed over to them by treaty in 1306. The city
continued its decline until its capture by the Mongol warlord Timur in 1402.
Archaeological expeditions By the 19th century, Sardis was in
ruins, showing construction chiefly of the Roman period. Early excavators
included the British explorer George Dennis, who uncovered an enormous marble
head of Faustina the Elder, wife of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius. Found in
the precinct of the Temple of Artemis, it probably formed part of a pair of
colossal statues devoted to the Imperial couple. The 1.76 metre high head is now
kept at the British Museum. The first large scale archaeological expedition in
Sardis was directed by a Princeton University team led by Howard Crosby
Butler between years 1910–1914, unearthing a temple to Artemis, and more
than a thousand Lydian tombs. The excavation campaign was halted by World
War I, followed by the Turkish War of Independence, though it briefly resumed
in 1922. Some surviving artifacts from the Butler excavation were added to the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
A new expedition known as the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis was
founded in 1958 by G.M.A. Hanfmann, professor in the Dept. of Fine Arts at
Harvard University, and by Henry Detweiler, dean of the Architecture
School at Cornell University. Hanfmann excavated widely in the city and the
region, excavating and restoring the major Roman bath-gymnasium complex, the
synagogue, late Roman houses and shops, a Lydian industrial area for processing
electrum into pure gold and silver, Lydian occupation areas, and tumulus
tombs at Bin Tepe. From 1976 until 2007, the excavation was directed by Crawford
H. Greenewalt, jr., professor in the Department of Classics at the University
of California, Berkeley. Since 2008, the excavation has been under the
directorship of Nicholas Cahill, professor at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison. The laws governing archaeological expeditions in Turkey
ensure that all archaeological artifacts remain in Turkey. Some of the important
finds from the site of Sardis are housed in the Archaeological Museum of Manisa,
including Late Roman mosaics and sculpture, a helmet from the mid-6th
century BC, and pottery from various periods.
Sardis synagogue Since 1958, both Harvard and Cornell
Universities have sponsored annual archeological expeditions to Sardis.
These excavations unearthed perhaps the most impressive synagogue in the western
diaspora yet discovered from antiquity, yielding over eighty Greek and seven
Hebrew inscriptions as well as numerous mosaic floors. The discovery of the
Sardis synagogue has reversed previous assumptions about Judaism in the later
Roman empire. Along with the discovery of the godfearers/theosebeis inscription
from Aphrodisias, it provides indisputable evidence for the continued
presence of Jewish communities in Asia Minor and their integration into general
Roman life at a time when many scholars previously assumed that Christianity had
eclipsed Judaism. The synagogue was a section of a large
bath-gymnasium complex, that was in use for about 450 – 500 years. In the
beginning, middle of the 2nd century AD, the rooms the synagogue is situated in
were used as changing rooms or resting rooms.
Sardis and the Hebrew Sepharad may have been one and the same.
See also Cities of the ancient Near East
List of synagogues in Turkey References
Further reading Hanfmann, George M.A., Et al. 1983.
Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times: Results of the Archaeological
Exploration of Sardis 1958–1975, Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-78925-3
Cahill, Nicholas D., ed. 2008. "Love for Lydia. A Sardis Anniversary Volume
Presented to Crawford H. Greenewalt, jr.", Archaeological Exploration of
Sardis. ISBN 9780674031951. External links
The Archaeological Exploration of Sardis The Archaeological Exploration of
Sardis, of the Harvard University Art Museums
The Search for Sardis, history of the archaeological excavations in Sardis, in
the Harvard Magazine Sardis, at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York Sardis Turkey, a comprehensive
photographic tour of the site The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical
Sites - Sardis Livius.org: Sardes - pictures