Sardis

Sardis lay on a spur at the northern foot of Mount Tmolus (modern Bozdağ), in the broad valley of the river Hermus in western Anatolia, where the small river Pactolus runs down through the site to join the Hermus and so reach the Aegean. The natural citadel, a steep triangular acropolis of soft rock, dominated the plain; the lower town spread below it, and the royal necropolis of great burial mounds, Bin Tepe, lay across the plain to the north. The position made the city the meeting point of the Anatolian interior and the Greek coast, and the terminus of the roads that ran east into the empire.

Two very different kinds of evidence describe the Achaemenid city, and their relation is unusually close. The first is the Greek literary tradition, above all Herodotus, a partial and external witness but for Sardis close to home: he came from Halicarnassus on the same western seaboard, and much of the first book of his Histories is given over to Lydia and its fall. The second is the archaeology, which at Sardis touches the same events the texts describe, corrects them where they mislead, and reaches the parts of the city's life, its potters, its dead, its languages, that no Greek author thought worth recording.

Before the Persians, Sardis was the seat of the Mermnad kings of Lydia, whose power reached from the Aegean coast to the river Halys and who had reduced the Ionian Greek cities of the shore to tribute. Its last king was Croesus, whose name became a byword among the Greeks for wealth, and the wealth was real: the Pactolus carried down electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, and the Lydians are generally credited with striking the first true coins from it in the generations before Croesus, whose own reign is associated with the first separate coinages of pure gold and pure silver.^[1] The gold of the region kept its fame into Persian times. When Darius listed the materials of his palace at Susa, Lydia stands near the head of the list:

The gold which was worked here was brought from Lydia (Sardis) and Bactria.

Darius I, DSf §10, trans. Kuhrt^[2]

The city had its own great goddess, Cybebe (Cybele), the mother goddess of the Phrygians and Lydians, whose sanctuary stood in the lower town, and a cult of Artemis that would grow under Persian rule. Both survived the conquest, and both figure in the Persian city that followed.

The kingdom fell to Cyrus in 547 or 546 BCE; the exact year is disputed, the Babylonian chronicle entry that should fix it being damaged. Croesus had crossed the Halys to test the rising Persian power, fought an indecisive battle, and withdrawn to Sardis to disband his army for the winter, expecting no campaign until spring. Cyrus followed at once, defeated the Lydian cavalry before the walls, and laid siege to the acropolis. The citadel was thought impregnable on the steep side that faced Tmolus, and it was there that it was lost. Herodotus tells how a Persian soldier watched a defender climb down after a fallen helmet, saw where the rock could be scaled, and led the assault up the unguarded cliff:

Hyroeades essayed to mount by a part of the citadel where no guard had been set; for here the height on which the citadel stood was sheer and hardly to be assaulted, and none feared that it could be taken by an attack made here.

Herodotus, Histories 1.84, trans. Godley^[3]

A local story, which Herodotus repeats, held that an early king of Sardis, Meles, had once carried a lion round the walls to make the city impregnable but had left out this one sheer stretch as beyond any attack. So Sardis was taken, on the fourteenth day of the siege. What became of Croesus, the pyre, the reprieve, the quieter captivity as the conqueror's counsellor, is told in several ways, and the date of the fall is disputed (see Croesus).^[4] The result for the city is not in doubt: Lydia's fall removed the one remaining independent power between Persia and the Aegean, whose shore the empire now reached. The contents of the royal treasuries were inventoried and sent east toward the centre of the empire-in-the-making, and a Persian, Tabalus, was installed with a garrison on the acropolis.^[5]

At most Achaemenid sites the conquest is a date in a text. At Sardis it is a stratum. Excavation at the city wall (sector MMS) has exposed a massive destruction horizon of the mid-sixth century: the colossal mudbrick fortification, some twenty metres high, pushed down over the houses that huddled against it, the debris of multicoloured brick partly fired in the open air and in places burnt to vitrification, sealing the burned dwellings of the Lydian kingdom beneath. The fighting itself is present in the ground, in "partial skeletons within the destruction debris and buried underneath it, as well as an iron helmet and sword, and a large quantity of arrowheads near the city gate".^[1] Writing in the 2021 Companion, Dusinberre singles the deposit out: "it is one of the rare examples of an archeological horizon clearly to be linked to an event described in historical sources".^[6] For a subject in which Greek narrative and Persian-period archaeology rarely meet, the Sardis destruction level is the anchor, and its excavator Nicholas Cahill has made it central to the redating of Lydian and early Persian levels across the site.^[6]

What the Persians did next is equally legible. In Dusinberre's summary, "The conquest of the city not only is described in literary sources but left a tangible result", the massive destruction levels "associated with the burning of parts of the city and the partial demolition of the city wall".^[1] The Lydian city gate was thoroughly blocked with cross-walls that carried the line of the old rampart on as an unbroken defence; the debris was packed into the recesses of the structure to make a smooth face; a second wall was later raised on the stump of the first, and sloping earthworks and a glacis were built against sapping. The city, that is, was not slighted but refortified, a decision Dusinberre reads as a statement of confidence: Sardis was to serve as "a fortified satrapal capital at the western edges of the empire, a safe base for launching military operations, a citadel that might be held against insurrectionists".^[1] The acropolis kept its own separate circuit, and by the end of the period the defences ran in concentric rings. A fragment of Aristotle preserves the arrangement as the Greeks saw it in 498: "The Athenians sailed with twenty ships to help the Ionians. And they marched to Sardis and took the entire area around Sardis outside the walls of the royal palace."^[7]

The first test of the new order came within months. Leaving Tabalus the garrison, Cyrus had assigned the gold of Croesus and the collection of revenue to a Lydian magnate, Pactyes, and marched east. Herodotus reports the sequel:

No sooner had Cyrus marched away from Sardis than Pactyes made the Lydians to revolt from Tabalus and Cyrus; and he went down to the sea, where, as he had all the gold of Sardis, he hired soldiers and persuaded the men of the coast to join his army.

Herodotus, Histories 1.154, trans. Godley^[8]

Pactyes then marched on Sardis and penned Tabalus in the citadel. The Mede Mazares, and after his death Harpagus, put the rising down, hunted Pactyes through the Greek cities that passed him from hand to hand, and reduced the coast.

Herodotus hangs on the episode one of his set-piece moral tales. Croesus, interceding to save his people from enslavement, advises Cyrus to unman them instead: "forbid them to possess weapons of war, and command them to wear tunics under their cloaks and buskins on their feet, and to teach their sons lyre-playing and song and dance and huckstering", so that the Lydians, once the terror of Asia, would turn "to women instead of men".^[8] The story explains, for a Greek audience, how the once-formidable Lydians became a byword for luxury; it is transparently a fable of decadence. What sits beneath it is a real and datable policy: after 546 the Lydian army disappears as a fighting force, and Briant reads the tale as the memory of a demobilisation, the placing of all armed force in the satrapy under Persian and Median command.^[5] The episode also shows the risk the Persians had taken in governing through local officials, and the lesson was drawn; the fiscal office Pactyes had held was not, so far as the record shows, entrusted to a Lydian again. The claim Greek writers later made, that Persians could not use Lydian administrators at all, overstates it, and the city's own inscriptions and seals contradict it.^[9]

Sardis became the capital of the satrapy the Persians called Sparda, the old kernel of the Lydian kingdom and the base from which the whole Anatolian west was, at first, governed. The satrap occupied the old Lydian royal palace, and the post went, more often than not, to men of the highest rank, sometimes to members of the royal house itself.^[9] The sequence of its holders is the political history of the Persian west in miniature.

The earliest satrap named after Tabalus is Oroetes, appointed under Cyrus and still in office at the accession of Darius: the type, in Herodotus, of the over-mighty governor, who lured the tyrant Polycrates of Samos to his death, killed a fellow governor and a royal messenger, and was finally destroyed by written order read out to his own guard. His story, and what it reveals of the leash the King kept on distant viceroys, has an account of its own (see the satrapy system).^[5] Darius then gave the west to his own brother: Artaphernes held Sardis through the years that led to the Ionian Revolt, received the exiled Athenian tyrant Hippias and the first Athenian embassy, held the acropolis when the rebels burnt the town, and closed the war not with reprisal but with the arbitration-and-survey settlement of 493, measuring the cities' lands "by parasangs" and fixing a tribute that, Herodotus says, still stood in his own day, "even as it was ordained by Artaphrenes".^[10] His son Artaphernes the younger was confirmed in the satrapy under Xerxes.^[6]

In the fifth century the seat was held by Pissuthnes, who meddled profitably in the Samian revolt against Athens in 440 and fed mercenaries to anti-Athenian factions in Ionia, until, under Darius II, he himself revolted, was betrayed by his Greek condottiere and executed; the satrapy passed, about 415, to one of the generals sent against him, Tissaphernes, the antagonist of Athens and Sparta by turns through the last phase of the Peloponnesian War.^[5] Beside and against Tissaphernes the King then set his own younger son: Cyrus came down in 408 with an extraordinary command, and Xenophon preserves the royal letter's wording, "I send Cyrus as karanos of those who muster at Castolus", the plain east of Sardis where the levies of the satrapy assembled.^[5][11] The office of karanos, commander of the western armies, normally travelled with the satrapy of Sparda; its grant to Cyrus was a deliberate diminution of Tissaphernes, and the rivalry played out at Sardis itself. At the trial of the Persian noble Orontas in 401, Cyrus's indictment was that "this man levied war upon me, holding the citadel of Sardis": even a plot against the prince began with the acropolis.^[12] From Sardis Cyrus launched, that spring, the march against his brother Artaxerxes II that Xenophon joined and recorded; after Cunaxa the city returned to Tissaphernes, and in the fourth century it remained the seat from which Tiribazus and then Autophradates held the west through the satrapal disturbances of the 360s.^[9]

Beneath the satrap the province had lesser governors: the Greek word hyparchos, "sub-governor", describes the rank of Droaphernes in the one Persian official inscription the city has yielded (below), and the machinery of registration ran deep. The land was surveyed and recorded; the Hellenistic Greeks of Sardis knew the old registers as the basilikai graphai, the "royal records", kept by an official who registered every transfer of conceded royal land, and behind them stands the Achaemenid cadastre that Artaphernes' survey of 493 presupposes.^[5]

Sardis was the western end of the great road the Persians maintained up to Susa, the artery Herodotus describes stage by stage, three months' walk for a traveller, days for the mounted royal post; the road itself, its stations, its couriers and its disputed course have their own entry.^[13] The road made the city the place where the empire's overland reach touched the sea, down which came the royal couriers, the marching levies and the bullion for the mint, and up which went tribute, labour and, at need, a condemned satrap. The reach was administrative fact, not metaphor. In the Persepolis Fortification archive a travel ration issued at Hidalu, on the border of Elam, is honoured against a sealed authorisation of "Irdapirna", Artaphernes, issued at Sardis some 2,400 kilometres away; parties of travellers "from Sardis" and to it thread through the tablets.^[14]

The archive has recently deepened the picture. A group of Fortification journal entries published by John Hyland records Lycian workers, labelled not kurtaš (dependent workers) but marataš, a term he derives from words for seizure, travelling under Artaphernes' authorisation to Persia in the years around 508 to 503. Hyland reads them as deportees in transit, the first administrative trace of the practice the Greek authors describe, and "the marataš travel documents offer the first definitive proof that the Sardis satrap's jurisdiction at this early period extended as far south as Lycia".^[15] The satrap of Sparda, that is, was the empire's labour contractor for the whole Anatolian frontier.

Sardians moved east in gentler capacities too. The foundation charter of Darius's palace at Susa records that the masons who cut its stone "were Ionians and Sardians", and the woodworkers "were Sardians and Egyptians";^[2] the Fortification tablets show Sardian craftsmen at work near Persepolis, among them iron-smiths.^[1] The skilled hands of the conquered west helped raise the King's houses in the heartland, and the two-way traffic of workers, rations and sealed orders binds the westernmost capital into the same documentary web as Persepolis itself.

In the first campaigning season of the Ionian Revolt the rebels carried the war to the satrapal capital. The Ionians, joined by ships from Athens and Eretria, marched up from Ephesus, took the lower town, and set it alight; the fire, catching in the reed-thatched houses, ran through the whole. The Lydians and the Persian garrison were driven back to the market-place, by the river "Pactolus, which flows through the market-place carrying down gold dust", and made their stand there while the town burned around them; Artaphernes held the acropolis throughout.^[16] The raiders withdrew and were cut up on the road to the coast. The town, and with it the sanctuary of the city's goddess, was gutted:

So Sardis was burnt, and therein the temple of Cybebe, the goddess of that country.

Herodotus, Histories 5.102, trans. Godley^[16]

Herodotus makes the fire the hinge of his whole war: the burnt temple became the Persian justification for burning Greek sanctuaries in return, and the news moved Darius to his arrow-shot prayer for vengeance and the servant's thrice-repeated "Master, remember the Athenians", the thread that runs to Marathon.^[17] The revolt, its causes and its settlement have their own account (see the Ionian Revolt); the city's own record of the episode may be architectural. The excavated fortification carries a heightening, the "secondary wall", that presents a smooth impenetrable face to attackers, and Dusinberre suggests the obvious occasion: after 499 the vulnerability of the lower town needed no demonstration, and the wall may have been raised before Xerxes wintered at the city.^[1]

When Xerxes gathered the empire's forces for the invasion of Greece, Sardis was the mustering ground. The army came up through Anatolia in 481 and wintered at the western capital, and it was on the road there that the Lydian magnate Pythius, probably a grandson of Croesus and by repute the wealthiest private man of the age, feasted the whole host, offered Xerxes his fortune, and later paid for one favour too many with his eldest son's life. From Sardis, in the spring of 480, the host set out for the Hellespont:

The army then wintered, and at the beginning of spring was ready and set forth from Sardis to march to Abydos.

Herodotus, Histories 7.37, trans. Godley^[18]

Sardis was equally the invasion's terminus. Xerxes fell back on the city after Salamis and passed the winter of 480 to 479 there, and it was at Sardis, in Herodotus's telling, that the court drama of the King's passion for the wife and daughter of his brother Masistes began, the tale of the woven robe and Amestris's revenge (see Xerxes). Dusinberre notes that Xerxes "may have enhanced its great fortification wall while there".^[6] The city that Cyrus had taken and the Ionians had burnt was now the assembly point and the refuge of the greatest of the Persian expeditions; when it failed, Sardis remained, as before, the seat from which the west was held.

Of the satrap's own quarter the spade has so far found little: the palace of the Lydian kings that the satraps took over is attested in the texts, Aristotle's "walls of the royal palace" among them, but not yet located on the ground, and the acropolis that should hold it has eroded steeply.^[7] The satrapal landscape is better preserved in its gardens. Along the Pactolus the satraps laid out formal parks, the paradeisoi that were the mark of a Persian great house, part pleasure-ground, part hunting park, part working estate; the paradise garden is treated in full elsewhere. Xenophon has the younger Cyrus show his garden at Sardis to a visiting Spartan and insist on his own share in it:

It is I who measured and arranged it all; some of the trees I planted with my own hands.

Cyrus the Younger, of his garden at Sardis; Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4, trans. Dakyns^[19]

The gold industry changed hands and changed shape. The refinery on the Pactolus where the Mermnads had parted gold from silver went out of use with the conquest, perhaps relocated away from the town; but gold-working itself continued, and the mint did too.^[1] Sardis struck the croeseids under its new masters and then, from Darius onward, the royal archer-coinage: it was the principal mint of the daric, and the tribute of the Anatolian provinces was gathered here. Lydia's association with gold was still legible at the empire's centre, where the foundation deposits under Darius's Apadana at Persepolis included croeseids of Sardis among the coins laid symbolically at the corners of the King's world.^[6]

Around the city the plain was parcelled into estates and villages whose names survive in two remarkable Greek inscriptions of the early Hellenistic period that palpably describe Achaemenid arrangements. The Mnesimachus inscription from the Artemis sanctuary details a dorea, a revocable royal land-grant, with its villages (Tobalmura, Periasasostra, Ilucome), its rents in money and produce, and its assignment to a chiliarchy, a military-fiscal district; the villagers bear mostly Lydian names, with a Babylonian among them.^[5] Briant draws the wider conclusion: "we must conclude that Sardis under Achaemenid dominion enjoyed some degree of autonomy", comparable in some respects to Babylon's, a city with its own hinterland of dependent villages, its own cults and courts, under the satrap's eye.^[5]

Two altars excavated on the west bank of the Pactolus, outside the wall, are the best physical evidence for religion in the Achaemenid city, and each tells a different story. The first, at the site where the great Hellenistic temple of Artemis would later rise, was built new in the Persian period: a stepped, solid platform of cut blocks, dated by an Achaemenid bowl sherd and a lamp in its fill. Its form is a hybrid and a deliberate one. The altar type belongs to the Ionian Greek coast, but the steps recall the fire altars of the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and the Persepolis seals, and Dusinberre reads the monument as "a remarkable and important hybrid of the East Greek form with the Persian fire altar form", built openly, at great cost, to a local goddess, under and within the empire.^[1] That the Persians themselves honoured the sanctuary is on record: Xenophon has Cyrus the Younger remind the plotter Orontas that he had taken sanctuary "at the altar of Artemis" and sworn friendship there.^[1] The goddess the Greeks later called "Persian Artemis" kept her statue-honours into the age of Alexander, when, Pausanias reports, "The Lydians erected a bronze statue of Adrastos himself" before the sanctuary of "Persian Artemis", honouring a hero fallen fighting Macedon; whether and how she had merged with the Iranian Anāhitā is debated, and the identification is easier to assert than to prove.^[1]

The second altar is the conversion. In the middle of the defunct Lydian gold refinery stood a small altar of Cybebe with a crouching lion at each corner. In the Achaemenid period it was rebuilt: the lions were taken down and sealed carefully inside the new, higher masonry, and the top shows clear traces of burning. It has been read as the turning of the Lydian goddess's altar into a fire altar, which would make it a rare physical trace of Iranian cult in the west, and a pointed counterpart to the Artemis altar half a kilometre upstream: the one local cult monumentalised under the empire, the other displaced by it.^[1] The reading is an inference, not a certainty; the excavation reports record no bone in the uppermost burning, and the identification of stepped or burnt structures as Zoroastrian fire altars is a recurring temptation the evidence does not always sustain. The nearby rock-cut tomb at Taş Kule, with its carved steps read as a fire altar, keeps the possibility open.^[1]

The one Persian official to speak in the city's epigraphy raises the sharpest question. A stone found in the Pactolus bed in 1974, recarved in the Roman period from an older dossier, records that in the thirty-ninth year of an Artaxerxes (429 or 367 BCE, the king being unnamed) Droaphernes son of Barakes, "sub-governor" (hyparchos) of Lydia, dedicated a statue to Zeus of Baradates.^[20] The first editor, Louis Robert, took "Zeus of Baradates" as a Greek dress for Ahura Mazdā and the second half of the text, which bars the god's temple-servants from the mysteries of Sabazios, Angdistis and Ma, as a Persian demand for cultic purity; on that reading, transmitted by the older reference literature, Sardis housed an official Mazdaean cult fenced off from its Anatolian neighbours. Pierre Briant's re-examination in 1998 took the inscription apart: the second half is a much later cult regulation with no claim to an Achaemenid date, and the first records nothing more than a Persian official's dedication to a cult of Zeus founded by a man with the Iranian name Baradates, a private benefaction, not an act of state religion. Kuhrt judges Robert's equation of this Zeus with Ahura Mazdā to be widely criticised and unsustainable, and Dusinberre reads the stone the other way about: not Iranian religion policed at Sardis, but an Iranian family so far woven into the city that it founded, and honoured across generations, a cult of a Greek god in a Lydian town.^[20][1] What would settle the matter, a securely dated Achaemenid text of the cult, has not been found; but the older confident picture of an official Ahura Mazdā cult at Sardis has been given up in the specialist literature since Briant's re-examination.

The dead of Achaemenid Sardis are its most excavated population, more than a thousand tombs, and they carry the argument about what the living had become. The rock-cut chamber tombs of the necropolis cliffs continued Lydian practice; the striking newcomers are two. The Pyramid Tomb, a chamber on a stepped limestone base, "has been convincingly reconstructed to bear a close resemblance to the Tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae", and sherds of Achaemenid bowls in its rubble fabric prove it was built after the Persian arrival, most likely within fifty years of Cyrus's own tomb.^[1] Who built a copy of the founder's tomb on the empire's far western edge, an Iranian proclaiming origin, or a Lydian proclaiming allegiance, cannot be known, and Dusinberre presses the question as a lesson in how little "ethnicity" explains at Sardis.^[1]

The second novelty is quieter: funerary couches appear in tombs of the Achaemenid period. In part they furnish the dead for the banquet in the new manner; but many burials at Sardis also avoided covering the corpse with earth, and, since (later) Zoroastrian rule forbids burial and demands exposure, Dusinberre allows that the couches may have served a religious purpose, "lifting corpses off the ground and symbolically surrounding them with air", exposure within the tomb.^[1] The suggestion is offered, rightly, as a possibility; the royal parallel, kings entombed above the earth in rock or masonry, points the same uncertain way.

At Bin Tepe the great tumuli of the Mermnad kings acquired, in the Achaemenid period, some hundred and fifty smaller imitations. The multiplication is a paradox with a point: the mound is the most Lydian of statements, royal tradition claimed downward by families that were not kings, yet the goods inside them, gold foil appliqués stamped with winged human-headed bulls, lion's-head earrings, a chariot burial, are the luxury vocabulary of the Persian elite.^[1] One sarcophagus burial (Tomb 813) held a man with a gold ring, rosette-and-lotus gold appliqués of court type, a cylinder seal of the King controlling lion-griffins, and a skull pierced by the blow that likely killed him: dressed for the empire, dead in its service, buried in a Lydian tomb.^[1]

The seals of Achaemenid Sardis, thirty-four from the excavated tombs, are the sharpest lens on its ruling class. Pyramidal stamp seals and cylinders, shapes and stones with no Lydian past, carry the imperial repertoire, heroes controlling lion-griffins, archers, enthroned kings, worked in a local manner long mislabelled "Graeco-Persian", a style Dusinberre argues was probably carved at Sardis itself and is best understood as "a newly composed and socially symbolic art of empire", the visible badge of the network that bound the Persian and the Persianizing elite into one class.^[1] The users cannot be sorted into Persians and Lydians by their seals, and that is the finding: some imperial-style seals carry Lydian names in Lydian letters, others Persian names in Aramaic, one the name of a king in Old Persian cuneiform. Taste ran with status, not blood. The seals were worn visibly on the body, adornment and credential at once, and the same koinē of images bound office-holders at Sardis to their counterparts at Dascylium and Persepolis.^[7]

The argument does not stop with the elite. The commonest table vessel of the Achaemenid city is the so-called Achaemenid bowl, a deep drinking bowl of Iranian metalware shape, unknown in Lydia before the conquest, produced at Sardis in local clay in enormous quantity; on the Apadana reliefs at Persepolis it is precisely the vessel the Lydian delegation carries to the King. By the earliest datable deposits, around 500 BCE, these bowls already outnumber the old Lydian skyphos: "the shift from using skyphoi to using Achaemenid bowls for drinking probably resulted from an internalization among the Sardian populace of Persian customs", the elite adopting the empire's manners and the non-elite emulating the elite.^[1] Cooking pots, dishes and diet shifted in the same generation. And the change outlived its cause: the bowls, and the habits they served, "continued long after the collapse of the Achaemenid political structure brought about by the campaigns of Alexander".^[1] Empire, at Sardis, reached the kitchen, and stayed there after the satraps had gone.

The city's own voice is Lydian. About a hundred Lydian inscriptions are known, most of them from Sardis and its valley, the majority funerary: formulaic curses on the tomb-door, naming the grave chamber of the dead man and his father and calling on the gods to destroy whoever damages it, the gods invoked being Artemis of Ephesus and Artemis of Koloe above all, the god Qλdans, occasionally Levs (Zeus).^[1] A handful of bilinguals, two Lydian-Aramaic and two Lydian-Greek, gave scholars their limited Rosetta stone for the language, and they map the city's tongues: Lydian for the townspeople throughout the Persian period and beyond (the last dated text falls around 323), Aramaic for the imperial administration, Greek gathering strength toward the end.^[1] No Old Persian inscription has been found at Sardis, and nothing suggests any attempt to impose Iranian language or cult on the town.^[9]

The texts also show the mixing the material culture implies. A priest of Artemis who endows a temple trust in two Lydian decrees bears the Iranian name Mitridastas. The so-called Sacrilege Inscription from Ephesus, of the very end of the period, "prescribes the death penalty for forty-five Sardians who had been found guilty of interfering with the rites of Ephesian Artemis at Sardis", and its list of the condemned and their fathers runs Lydian, Greek, Carian and Iranian names through single families: a Mithridates son of a Lydian, a Lydian grandson of a Persian.^[1] By the fourth century, personal names at Sardis had stopped tracking descent, which is itself the measure of a mixed city; the professions attached to the accused, bath-men, shoe-sellers, a goldsmith, a sacred herald, give a rare glimpse of the ordinary town.^[1]

What all this amounts to is the central debate of Achaemenid Sardis, and it has moved decisively within living scholarship. An older literature, reading the continuity of Lydian tombs, language and cult, concluded that the Persian presence was a thin lid on an unchanged city, one instance of a general thesis of Achaemenid "non-impact" in the provinces; the excavators themselves long emphasised how little looked Persian.^[1] Dusinberre's synthesis of 2003 reversed the verdict by widening the evidence: the refortification, the new altar forms, the seals, the appliqués, the couches, the bowls and the diet describe not an untouched city under foreign guard but a capital whose elite, Iranian, Lydian and Greek together, built a new shared culture out of imperial ideology and local material, and whose ordinary households absorbed it by emulation. On her reading the empire worked at Sardis less by settlement and force than by making adherence attractive: the polyethnic elite displayed its membership in portable, imitable things, and the city re-made itself around them.^[1]

Two cautions qualify the picture without overturning it. Sekunda's study of Iranian settlement in Lydia argued that the Iranian communities of the countryside, at Hierakome, at "Dareioukome" ("Darius-village"), in the Hyrcanian plain, were not planted garrisons but grew from land-grants to discharged soldiers, mostly under Cyrus, and that they had lost any military character well before the end; Persian colonisation, on this view, was real but shallow, and the survival of Iranian cults in Roman Lydia is no proof of dense Iranian blood.^[21] And Briant, surveying the whole "Achaemenid impact" question for Anatolia, warns that the cultural borrowings cut both ways as evidence: "the evidence attests just as much to the autonomy of the local cultures as to reception of Persian and Iranian values and representations", and Persianizing seals and tombs do not by themselves measure Persian government.^[22] The balance of the field now sits with Dusinberre for Sardis itself, while her Sardian model is tested, region by region, across Anatolia; what would move the question decisively, the digging of the Achaemenid-period domestic quarters and the satrap's residence, has yet to happen.^[7]

Sardis fell to Alexander without a blow. After the Granicus, Arrian reports, the Persian commandant rode out to meet him: Mithrenes surrendered the citadel and the treasure, and Alexander, climbing to the fortress the Ionians had never taken, found "it was very lofty, precipitous on every side, and fenced round by a triple wall".^[23] He treated Mithrenes with honour, kept the machinery of tribute running under new officers, and "granted the Sardians and other Lydians the privilege of enjoying the ancient laws of Lydia, and permitted them to be free"; on the height where the palace of the Lydian kings had stood, a summer thunderstorm marked, he believed, the spot for a temple of Olympian Zeus.^[23] The gesture reads as continuity as much as liberation: a new king confirming a provincial capital in its standing, as the Persians had confirmed it two centuries before.

So it continued. Sparda became the Seleucid province of Lydia, still governed from Sardis; the Mnesimachus inscription shows the Achaemenid land-regime running on under new lords, and the royal records office kept its Persian-period books.^[5] The Iranian families settled around the city can be traced for centuries, worshipping their gods under Greek names, Anāhitā as "Persian Artemis", into the Roman era; the Achaemenid drinking bowl outlasted the Achaemenids in the city's houses.^[9][1] The seat that Cyrus took from Croesus outlasted the empire that made it a capital, and it is at Sardis, better than anywhere else in the King's dominions, that the archaeology of what empire did to a city can actually be read.