Science: Where Croesus Reigned

One of the greatest cultural strains that influenced Western civilization flowed through Lydia in Asia Minor, for many centuries an industrial and financial center. Many historians believe that the Etruscans of Italy, from whom the early Romans got much of their culture, were Lydian colonists. The last King of Lydia, Croesus, was legendary for his vast wealth, and his capital, Sardis, was a splendid city that served after his death as the western capital of the Persian Empire.

New Effort. Archaeologists were sure that the ruins of Sardis would prove extremely interesting, but they could not excavate them because they did not know exactly where the Lydian Sardis stood. The whole Sardis region, 45 miles inland from Turkey’s modern Izmir, is cluttered with Greek, Roman and Christian ruins. When diggers explored this relatively common stuff they did not find Lydian Sardis under it. This summer, a joint Harvard-Cornell expedition led by Professor George Hanfmann of Harvard, made another effort. Last week came the announcement that the site of Lydian Sardis has finally been found.

The discovery was made by detective work added to heavy digging. After spending part of the summer excavating the conspicuous ruins of a temple of Artemis, the diggers got down to the river bed without finding anything Lydian. In other promising spots they found only worthless Roman or Christian remains, and a few Lydian potsherds. But when they attacked the foundations of a large Roman-Byzantine structure called “Building B,” they found a promising clue: a great marble block with an inscription telling that the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus (A.D. 130-169) had passed that way and given a sum of money to the gymnasium, which was probably a kind of school. This suggested that Building B might be the gymnasium mentioned. If so, the diggers were hot on the trail. According to ancient writers, the Sardis gymnasium was within sight of the royal palace of Croesus.

Old Site. After working for a while near Building B, the diggers found the ruins of a luxurious Roman house that seems to have been the mansion of a rich Christian bishop. Under its floor was what they were seeking: a large mass of broken pottery of Lydian manufacture. Nothing like it had ever been found in the Sardis region, so Professor Hanfmann is reasonably sure that he has found the deeply buried site of the Lydian city.

No golden Lydian treasures or inscriptions in Lydia’s language have yet come out of these diggings, but archaeologists are excited and hopeful. Lydia’s contribution to civilization was largely obscured by the Greeks, who proverbially wrote all the histories and gave themselves all the breaks. The finding of Lydia’s splendid capital may lead to better knowledge of the non-Greek roots of Western culture.