Lydia Lydia Leone Allacci Category="Anatolia"Category="Ancient peoples"Category="Empires"Category="Middle East"
This article is about the ancient kingdom in Anatolia. For other uses of this word, see Lydia (disambiguation).

Lydia is a historic region of western Anatolia, congruent with Turkey's modern provinces of İzmir and Manisa. Its traditional capital was the city of Sardis (Turkish: Sart). However, at its greatest extent, the Kingdom of Lydia covered all of western Anatolia. It was later the name for a Roman province. Coins were invented in Lydia around 650 BC.

Pre-history

The region of Lydia was probably settled by Indo-European peoples in the late Bronze Age (around the twelfth century BC), during the decay of the Hittite Empire. Herodotus (Histories i. 7) and Homer (Iliad ii. 865; v. 43, 11. 431) both refer to them as Meiones (Μηιονες). However, Herodotus adds that they were named after their first king, Lydos (Λυδος), who was believed to be descended from the divine couple Attis and Cybele. This mythological name gave rise to the Greek ethnic name Lydoi (Λυδοι) and the Hebrew Lūḏīm (םידול, cf. Jer. 46.9). Their language, Lydian, is related to Hittite and a member of the Anatolian language family. Lydian became extinct during the first century BC.

Lydia in Greek legend

Main article: Omphale
In Greek mythology, Omphale was a queen or princess of Lydia. It was also during his stay in Lydia that Heracles enslaved the Itones, killed Syleus who forced passersby to hoe his vineyard, and captured the Cercopes. It would be expected that accounts should speak of at least one son born to Heracles by Omphale. Diodorus Siculus (4.31.8) and Ovid in his Heroides (9.54) mention a son named Lamos. But Apollodorus (2.7.8) gives the name of the son of Heracles and Omphale as Agelaus. Pausanias (2.21.3) gives yet another name, mentioning Tyrsenus son of Heracles by "the Lydian woman" by whom Pausanias presumably means Omphale. Herodotus (1.7) refers to a Heraclid dynasty of kings who ruled Lydia yet were perhaps not descended from Omphale. Later chronographers who also ignored Herodotus' statement that Agron was the first to be a king and included Alcaeus, Belus, and Ninus in their List of Kings of Lydia. Strabo (5.2.2) makes Atys father of Lydus and Tyrrhenus to be one of the descendants of Heracles and Omphale. This is likely careless error rather than independent tradition as all other accounts place Atys and Lydus and Tyrrhenus brother of Lydus among the pre-Heraclid kings of Lydia.

Geography

[image] [image] The boundaries of Lydia varied across the centuries. It was first bounded by Mysia, Caria, Phrygia and Ionia. Later on, the military power of Alyattes and Croesus expanded Lydia into an empire, with its capital at Sardis, which controlled all Asia Minor west of the River Halys, except Lycia. Lydia never again shrank back into its original dimensions. After the Persian conquest the Maeander was regarded as its southern boundary, and under Rome, Lydia comprised the country between Mysia and Caria on the one side and Phrygia and the Aegean on the other.

The Lydians were the first people to establish retail shops which were permanent according to Herodotus.

The name of Croesus of Lydia became synonymous with wealth. Lydia was the first country to mint coins (circa 650 BC). Sardis was renowned as a beautiful city. Around 550 BC Croesus paid for the construction of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Croesus was beaten by Cyrus in 546 BC, and the kingdom became a province of the Persian Empire.

Homer speaks only of Maeonians (Iliad ii. 865, V. 43, 11. 431) and describes their capital not as Sardis but as Hyde (Ii. xx. 385); but Hyde may have been the name of the district in which Sardis stood (see Straho xiii. p. 626).

When Herodotus (i. 7) tells that the "Meiones" (called Maeones by other writers) were named Lydians after Lydus, the son of Attis, in the mythical epoch which preceded the rise of the Heracleid dynasty, we may be able to identify a kernel of social history in the purely conventional guise of an Eponym descended from a god. Straightforward deconstruction reveals a social upheaval, perhaps in the early 1st millennium BC (perhaps even after the age of Homer) in which the cult of Attis, the consort of Cybele, the Great Goddess of Anatolia, was introduced among the Maeones by a new dynasty.

Some Maeones still existed in historical times inhabiting the upland interior along the River Hermus, where a town called Maeonia existed, according to Pliny the Elder (Natural History book v:30) and Hierocles.

Language

Lydian language was a Indo-European language, which belongs to the New Anatolian languages, coming from Hittite, but with some changes. The language uses many prefixes and Particles.

Autochotonous Dynasties

Main article: List of Kings of Lydia

Lydia was ruled by three dynasties: the Atyads (1300BC or earlier) -

Heraclids (Tylonids) (to 687BC) (According to Herodotus the Heraclids ruled for 22 generations during the period from 1185BC lasting for 505 years). Alyattes was the king of Lydia in 776BC. The last king of this dynasty was Mursylos (Greek) or Candaules (Lydian)

Mermnads.

"On the refusal of Alyattes to give up his suppliants when Cyaxares sent to demand them of him, war broke out between the Lydians and the Medes, and continued for five years, with various success. In the course of it the Medes gained many victories over the Lydians, and the Lydians also gained many victories over the Medes."
The Battle of the Eclipse was the final battle in a fifteen-year war between Alyattes II of Lydia and Cyaxares of the Medes. It took place on May 28, 585 BC, and ended abruptly due to a total solar eclipse.

Persian and hellenistic empires

Roman province of Asia/ Lydia

When the Romans entered its capital Sardis in 133 BC, Lydia, as the other western parts of the Attalid legacy, became part of Asia [Minor], a very rich Roman province, worthy to keep a governor of the high rank of Proconsul.

As the whole west of Asia Minor had jewish colonies very early, it is not surprising that Christianity was present soon there (Acts of the Apostles 16:14 mentions a business woman called Lydia who came from Thyatira from the province of Lydia) and spread generally in the 3rd century AD, centered on the nearby exarchate of Ephesus.

Under the Tetrarchy reform of Emperor Diocletian in 296AD, Lydia was the name of a separate Roman province (much smaller then the original satrapy) around Sardes. Together with the provinces of Caria, Hellespontus, Lycia, Pamphylia, Phrygia prima & secunda, Pisidia and the Insulae (Ionian islands), it formed the diocese (under a vicarius) of Asiana, which was part of the Praetorian prefecture of Oriens, together with the dioceses Pontiana (most of the rest of Asia Minor), Oriens proper (mainly Syria), Aegyptus and Thraciae (on the Balkans, roughly Bulgaria).

Byzantine and later period

Under the Byzantine emperor Haraclius (610-641), it became part of Anatolikon, one of the original themata, later of Thrakesion. While the caliphate and next the Seljuk Turks (sultanate of Ikonion) conquered most of Anatolia for islam, Lydia was part of the Byzantine rest empire, during the Catholic crusader's occupation of Constantinople still part of the Byzantine orthodox 'Greek Empire' at Nicaea, finally falling prey to new beyliks, which would all be absorbed by the Ottoman state in 1390, which made it part of its vilayet (province) of Aydin, ending up as westernmost part of the modern republic of Turkey.

See also