The Legacy of the Lydians

According to Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who was born in Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), the Lydians drove out the Heraklids, a dynasty descended from the ancient hero Heracles, under their first major leader Gyges (c.680-44). The Paroclus River ran through the area they claimed, and it was in this river that they panned for gold, or rather electrum, a gold and silver alloy. The Lydian kingdom nudged up against that of the Phrygians with whom they had much in common. It was the Phrygian King Midas who had prayed that everything he touch be turned to gold, only to find that that included his food and his daughter. Begging to be relieved of his unfortunate gift, Midas passed it on to the Paroclus -- and the rest was Lydian history.

Today the remains of Sardis stand in the countryside around the modern village of Sart. It was here that the great Ottoman artist and museologist Osman Hamdi Bey suggested that archeologists start digging, and what they uncovered was enough to indicate that this had once been a hugely important city, albeit one whose stones had long since been carried away for reuse elsewhere. Today as you approach it along a stretch of Roman road you pass the slight remains of a series of shops in an area that has been described as a bazaar. The current exhibition suggests, however, that they would probably have been combined shop-houses since many of the items found inside them suggest a domestic purpose. A reconstruction shows a typically simple dwelling with mud-brick walls, an earthen floor and a thatch roof.

Interestingly, Sardis appears to have had a sizeable Jewish population. The shop-houses once backed onto a third-century synagogue whose magnificent mosaic floor still survives, and one of the shops appears to have been owned by a man called Jacob. Beyond the synagogue, however, other remains are typical of other Classical-era sites and confirm that Sardis continued in importance long after the Lydians had been consigned to history. There are, for example, remains of a hamam and gymnasium, both of them dating back to the second century and apparently destroyed during a Sassanian raid in 616. There’s not a lot else to see at the site, although it’s completely dominated by one reconstructed wall of a temple to the imperial cult.

A little further down the road in a separate site stand remains of a Temple to Artemis. Of the Lydians themselves there’s not a lot to see, just a stretch of wall opposite the main site and slight remains of a house with a Roman rebuild right on top of them. The exhibition contains a reconstruction of the elaborate painted roof tiles that may have topped off public buildings in the Lydian era, but it’s extremely speculative and there’s nothing at Sardis itself with which to compare it.

Lydian art work at the Uşak Museum

In fact, the most striking reminders of the Lydians are the tumuli that are scattered about an area called Bintepe (One Thousand Hills). Believed to have contained the remains of the Lydian kings including Gyges, they are very like those around Gordion that contained the remains of the Phrygian kings, highlighting once again the links between the two cultures. Some of these tumuli are absolutely enormous. That of King Alyattes is 69 meters high but measures a kilometer around its base. Amongst those said to have labored to build it, a group of prostitutes are said to have been the most zealous.

The exhibition comments sadly that many of the Lydian tombs have been destroyed by treasure-hunters. To understand why that might be you have to travel inland to the small town of Uşak, which has little to recommend it bar a remarkable small museum. Externally there’s nothing to suggest that it’s anything other than another of the same-same museums that lurk unloved in the suburbs of most Turkish towns. This one, however, is something else because it houses the wonderful horde of Lydian silver excavated from the İkiztepe and Toptepe tumuli nearby.

This is a treasure trove that comes with a story of international shenanigans. The priceless collection of gold and silver bowls, censers and jewelry was first discovered in 1966 and removed from the country by the finders, who sold them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1993 a US court case decreed that they should be returned to Turkey where the decision was made -- erroneously in retrospect -- to put them on display not in the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilizations where they would have been seen by a large audience, but in Uşak’s tiny, never-visited museum where no one would notice if anything untoward happened to them. Sure enough, in 2006 an inventory of the museum uncovered what has been called “the Susurluk of museums”: Some of the items had been replaced with fakes. Last year the museum director was convicted of theft and sentenced to 13 years in jail although the stolen items are yet to be recovered, amongst them a unique golden brooch in the shape of a winged seahorse.

Bearing all this in mind, it’s especially important that as many people as possible do go to the museum, which incorporates an evocative reconstruction of the interior of one of the tumuli with lion-footed stone benches provided so that the dead could recline in comfort while they feasted on the food laid out in the silver bowls. According to the exhibition, popular Lydian meals incorporated hare and francolin as well as a sauce made from blood and spices. For dessert they apparently liked nothing more than to sit down to a plate of honey and figs, or a piece of tamarind-flavored nougat. Also especially worthy of note are the wall paintings from the Aktepe tumulus, which have a very Egyptian flavor.

At its height the Lydian kingdom encompassed Ephesus (Efes) and Miletus as well as Sardis, and Lydian finds have come to light at both these sites, too. The end came in 546 B.C. when King Croesus (the man from whom we took the phrase “rich as Croesus”) was defeated by Cyrus the Great of Persia. After that Sardis suffered the usual succession of rulers including Alexander the Great, until finally it was razed to the ground by Tamerlane in 1401.

As for the coins, they were probably first used some time between 610 and 550 B.C. during the reign of King Alyattes, the father of Croesus. They probably helped the Lydians grow rich from trade by making the exchanges easier to handle.

The exhibition at the Yapı Kredi gallery continues until May 15.

WHERE TO STAY

Sardis is best visited on

a day trip from İzmir.

 Otel Dülgeroğlu, Uşak.

Tel: 0276-227 3773

 HOW TO GET THERE

Buses to Salihli leave from the upstairs section of İzmir’s bus station. Catch an onward dolmuş to Sart from the back of the Salihli Otogar and ask to be dropped off at Sardis. Buses from İzmir or Afyon to Uşak will probably drop you on the highway. The museum is just off the main road into the center.