From Wikipedia
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,
[1] 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.
The earliest reference to Sardis is in
The Persians of
Aeschylus (472 BC); in the
Iliad, the name Hyde seems to be given to the city of the
Lydian 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 Lydian, but that it became so amid the changes which produced the powerful
Lydian empire of the 8th century BC.
Map of Sardis and Other Cities within the Lydian Empire
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. Sardis was the site of the most important Persian satrapy.
[2] 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.
[3]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 with the help of ten million
sesterces from the Emperor and exempted from paying taxes for five years.
[4] It was one of the great cities of western
Asia Minor until the later
Byzantine period.
