Where is sardis turkey

Located in the modern day town of Sart, it was occupied from approximately B. The most famous ruler of Sardis was King Croesus, to BC who notoriously misinterpreted an oracle prediction, believing he would win a battle against the Persian king.

He lost and the city was absorbed into the Persian Empire, later giving way to Alexander the Great, Byzantine and Roman rule. Ottoman Turks invaded in but by , the city had been deserted and left to ruins. Thank to impressive archaeology work undertaken during the 19 th century, we can see the main monuments that have been excavated and restored.

Sitting on the banks of the Pactolus River, it was also one of the seven churches of Asia, mentioned in the New Testament book of Revelation. Called the church that fell asleep, it referred more to the manner of Christian citizens living in the city, rather than the actual church congregation itself. The temple of Artemis reflects a time when pagan worship was popular. Construction started in BC, but was never finished and natural wear and tear over the years, means very little remains.

Focus should be on its significance, rather than size because if it had been completed, it would have been the fourth largest Ionian temple of the Aegean coast. The Jewish synagogue dating from the 3 rd century AD highlights the large Jewish community that lived in the region.

Historians say this is the large synagogue ever excavated and just the walls, floors and columns, Greek and Hebrew inscriptions and mosaics, remain, yet this is enough to gain a good idea of when the synagogue was at its most glorious.

One of the most impressive structures to see is the marble court entrance. This leads into the gymnasium and bathhouse. Under Roman rule, Sardis continued to flourish, although it never gained the stature it had had under the Lydians. It housed magnificent colonnaded avenues, monumental imperial baths, important temples of the Imperial cult, and an arms factory. It is during this period that the citizens of the city built the largest synagogue known in the ancient world. During the fourth century, Sardis became an important Christian center, the site of one of the Seven Churches of Asia.

By the close of the sixth century AD, Sardis constituted a city with a very rich heritage, the ancestral home of Lydians, the birthplace of coinage, the location of the Temple of Artemis, and a community that supported Jewish and Christian faiths. A Lydian industrial sector outside the city walls, which preserves the earliest evidence in the world for the refining of electrum into pure gold and silver, the Lydian fortification, which enclosed the city with a massive defense 20 m wide at the base and preserved up to 10 m high, larger than any other defense work in Anatolia, well-preserved Lydian houses, late Roman houses, natural terraces, the Acropolis with Lydian architectural remains and major Byzantine fortifications, the Temple of Artemis, the fourth largest Iconic temple in the world, a Roman Bath-Gymnasium complex with its monumental columned Marble Court, a Sanctuary of the Roman Imperial cult, The adjacent theater and stadium, the Synagogue, the largest in the ancient world, a small chapel, the Byzantine Shops, burial tombs are the major buildings and building complexes of the ancient Sardis.

These tumuli are the most conspicuous ancient landmarks ofLydia, visible from afar and marking the region as a place of peculiar, haunting significance. Covering some 74 square kilometers, Bin Tepe is the largest tumulus cemetery inTurkey. Today about tumuli survive in Bin Tepe. The largest is the tumulus of Alyattes, king ofSardisfrom about BC.

The Lydian tumuli of Bin Tepe are testament to the prominence of this landscape in the sixth and fifth centuries BC.

Despite its most famous and halting mounded appearance, Bin Tepe was more than just a tumulus cemetery of the Lydian period, with both much earlier and much later remains attesting the continuity of its cultural significance. Bin Tepe was tightly connected toSardisas its royal cemetery. A Middle Paleolithic site, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age settlements or cemeteries, the tumulus of Lydian king Alyattes, two other colossal Lydian tumuli, or so additional, smaller tumuli, Several settlements of the Lydian, Hellenistic, Roman, late Medieval, and Ottoman periods are major monuments and sites of Bin Tepe.

Sardis holds a unique place in the history of Greece and the Near East. As tradesmen, patrons and conquerors, the Lydians played a vital role in the cultural interchanges between Greece and the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Near East. The archaeological site of Sardis documents this unique position. Although Sardis is mentioned frequently by Classical authors, we have very few written documents from the Lydians themselves; this makes the archaeological remains all the more important.

The palace reflects an institution entirely foreign to the Greeks. The Lydian gold atelier attests the earliest known separation of electrum into pure gold and silver, and the extraordinary wealth of the city. The later buildings of Sardis demonstrate the continuing importance of the city. Its magnificent Hellenistic temple aimed to place the city among the great Ionian Metropoleis of Ephesus, Samos, and Miletus. Churches, synagogue, temples and dedications to local Anatolian, Greek, and Roman deities attest the polytheistic nature of the city throughout its history, while the inscriptions in a multitude of languages — Lydian, Carian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and at least one completely unknown script — demonstrate the multiethnic nature of Sardian society.

Houses from the Lydian through the Late Roman period form a unique record of the cultural adaptations and changes.

The royal cemetery of Bin Tepe remains one of the most distinctive and evocative landscapes in Turkey. Its monumental tumuli proclaim and demonstrate the royal power of Sardis as did the pyramids of Egypt or the Eastern Qing tombs of China, and the vast necropolis that grew up around these royal graves is among the largest in the world.

Although most famous for the tumuli, the region is the home of a major, newly-discovered Bronze Age kingdom contemporary with the Mycenaean Greeks, the Trojans, and the Hittites, with a network of pristine ancient sites dating to the second millennium BC, and of occupation sites dating from the Paleolithic through the modern era.

The already-ancient kingdom was perhaps a landscape of memory for the Lydians a thousand years later, just as Sardis remained a landscape of memory for later generations in the Hellenistic, Roman, and later eras. Criterion i : Sardis was one of the preeminent cities of the ancient world, the capital of an empire that ruled western Anatolia, the birthplace of coinage, and the home of Croesus, whose name became synonymous with unimaginable wealth.

The city was an unusual example of urban planning, the steep natural landscape monumentalized and regularized by rhythmic, crisply built terraces that anticipated the layout of Hellenistic Pergamon, and ringed by the largest fortification outside Mesopotamia. Sardis houses one of the largest Ionic temples in the world, arguably the most picturesque Ionic temple surviving today. Its well-preserved Roman buildings include a monumental bath-gymnasium building and the largest synagogue of the ancient world.

The Lydian tumulus cemetery at Bin Tepe is the site of some of the largest tumuli in the world, rivaling the pyramids of Giza for sheer monumentality. Criterion ii : Located at the border between the Greek world and the great civilizations of central Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Near East, Sardis had strong ties to both Eastern and Western cultural traditions.

Throughout its long history it was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual area of fruitful cultural interchange. The Lydians made significant contributions to the development of ancient monumental architecture, town planning, and the minor arts. The lower city was ranged along the steep slopes and natural terraces north of the acropolis. The Lydian kings enclosed this city by a massive fortification, many times larger than any contemporary fortification in Anatolia, or indeed anywhere outside the great cities of Mesopotamia, Nineveh, Nimrud, or Babylon.

It seems likely that as they grew from a local kingdom to a powerful empire and came into contact with the empires of Mesopotamia, the Lydians looked to these eastern metropoleis for models of what an imperial capital should look like.

Their terraces in turn became prototypes for the new capital city of Pasargadae in Iran, begun by Cyrus the Great after he had conquered Sardis, and probably built in large part by Lydian and Ionian masons.

A major sanctuary of Sardis was that of Cybele, and the Lydians were instrumental in the introduction of this Anatolian mother goddess to the west. Indigenous Lydian traditions continued well into later centuries. As the inventors of coinage, the Lydians began a system that remains central to most subsequent monetary economies up to the present. In addition to Lydians, Carians, Greeks, and other ethnic groups it had a substantial Jewish population, and its Roman synagogue is the largest in the ancient world.

Criteriuon iii : Sardis was the capital and only city of the Lydians. While Lydians were settled widely throughout western Anatolia, no other city is so directly associated with this vanished civilization. Unlike Greek, Roman, or many other ancient cultures, Lydian remains are peculiarly concentrated in this one location.

Since the surviving written histories come primarily from the records of other cultures, the material culture of Sardis plays an essential role in our understanding of this ancient civilization.

The preservation of ancient remains at Sardis, in Bin Tepe varies widely depending largely on natural topography, later rebuilding, and earlier explorations, licit and illicit. Some areas of Sardis are eroded or were overbuilt in later eras, while other parts of the city are deeply buried and very well preserved; many of the tumuli in Bin Tepe were opened over a century ago and continue to be looted.

Archaeological research in the area dates back to the expedition of Robert Wood in Nineteenth century researchers include L. In the early twentieth century excavation was begun by Mendel on behalf of the Imperial Ottoman Museums in İstanbul, and continued by Howard Crosby Butler of Princeton University, from and then in A hiatus followed until , when excavations and surveys were renewed by G.

Hanfmann of Harvard University, and these have continued every year since. Much excavation has focused on regions of Sardis outside the walls: the extramural Temple of Artemis, the Bath-Gymnasium complex, the gold atelier along the Pactolus, and other sectors.

The current state of excavated remains varies greatly from building to building. The marbletempleofArtemisis mostly affected by biogrowth; a project to clean the entire building has been planned and will begin in The Lydian Altar and Church M had deteriorated significantly since their excavation more than a century ago; a project to conserve the altar was just completed, while the church is being studied for a separate conservation project.

The Bath-Gymnasium complex, synagogue, Byzantine Shops, and related areas were restored in the s and s, according to the best standards then in use. The Marble Court was the first large-scale anastylosis project in Turkey, and became a model for later projects such as the Library of Celsus at Ephesus.