Түркиядағы ежелгі Сарт қаласы

Ancient city in Turkey
the ancient Lydian city

Sardis ('/s//ɑr//d//ɪ//s/ SARdiss) or Sardes ('/s//ɑr//d//iː//s/ SARdeess; Lydian: 𐤳𐤱𐤠𐤭, romanized: ; Σάρδεις; ) was an ancient city best known as the capital of the Lydian Empire. After the fall of the Lydian Empire, it became the capital of the Persian satrapy of Lydia and later a major center of Hellenistic and Byzantine culture. Now an active archaeological site, it is located in modern day Turkey, in Manisa Province near the town of Sart.

Sardis was occupied for at least 3500 years. In that time, it fluctuated between a wealthy city of international importance and a collection of modest hamlets.

Sardis was settled before 1500 BC. However, the size and nature of early settlement is not known since only small extramural portions of these layers have been excavated. Evidence of occupation consists largely of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age pottery which shows affinities with Mycenaean Greece and the Hittites. No early monumental architecture had been found as of 2011. The site may have been occupied as early as the Neolithic, as evidenced by scattered finds of early ceramic fragments. However these were found out of context so no clear conclusions can be drawn. Early Bronze Age cemeteries were found 7 miles away along Lake Marmara, near elite graves of the later Lydian and Persian periods. Relatively little of Persian Sardis is visible in the archaeological record. The city may even have been rebuilt outside the limits of the Lydian era walls, as evidenced by authors such as Herodotus who place the Persian era central district along the Pactolus stream. The material culture of the city was largely continuous with the Lydian era, to the point that it can be hard to precisely date artifacts based on style. Buildings from this era include a possible predecessor of the later temple to Artemis as well as a possible sanctuary of Zeus. Textual evidence suggests that the city was known for its paradisoi as well as orchards and hunting parks built by Tissaphernes and Cyrus the Younger

Later, trade and the organization of commerce continued to be sources of great wealth. After Constantinople became the capital of the East, a new road system grew up connecting the provinces with the capital. Sardis then lay rather apart from the great lines of communication and lost some of its importance. During the cataclysmic 7th Century Byzantine–Sasanian War, Sardis was in 615 one of the cities sacked in the invasion of Asia Minor by the Persian Shahin. Though the Byzantines eventually won the war, the damage to Sardis was never fully repaired. Sardis retained its titular supremacy and continued to be the seat of the metropolitan bishop of the province of Lydia, formed in 295 AD. It was enumerated as third, after Ephesus and Smyrna, in the list of cities of the Thracesion thema given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century. However, over the next four centuries it was in the shadow of the provinces of Magnesia upon Sipylum and Philadelphia, which retained their importance in the region.

Sardis began to decline in the 600s AD. It remained part of the Byzantine Empire until 1071 AD, when it was conquered by the Seljuk Turks. It was reconquered in 1097 by the Byzantine general John Doukas and came under the rule of the Byzantine Empire of Nicea when Constantinople was taken by the Venetians and Franks in 1204. However once the Byzantines retook Constantinople in 1261, Sardis and surrounding areas fell under the control of Ghazw emirs. The Cayster valleys and a fort on the citadel of Sardis were handed over to them by treaty in 1306. The city continued its decline until its capture and probable destruction by the Turco Mongol warlord Timur in 1402. By the 1700s, only two small hamlets existed at the site. In the 20th century, a new town was built. The name "Sardis" appears first in the work of the Archaic era poet Sappho. Strabo claims that the city's original name was "Hyde". The first large scale archaeological expedition in Sardis was directed by a Princeton University team led by Howard Crosby Butler between years 1910–1914, unearthing a temple to Artemis, and more than a thousand Lydian tombs. The excavation campaign was halted by World War I, followed by the Turkish War of Independence, though it briefly resumed in 1922. Some surviving artifacts from the Butler excavation were added to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A new expedition known as the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis was founded in 1958 by G. M. A. Hanfmann, professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University, and by Henry Detweiler, dean of the Architecture School at Cornell University. Hanfmann excavated widely in the city and the region, excavating and restoring the major Roman bath gymnasium complex, the synagogue, late Roman houses and shops, a Lydian industrial area for processing electrum into pure gold and silver, Lydian occupation areas, and tumulus tombs at Bintepe. During the 1960s, the acknowledgment of the local significance of the Jewish community in Sardis received notable confirmation through the identification of a substantial assembly hall in the northwestern part of the city, now known as the Sardis Synagogue. This site, adorned with inscriptions, menorahs, and various artifacts, establishes its function as a synagogue from the 4th to the 6th century. Excavations in adjacent residential and commercial areas have also uncovered additional evidence of Jewish life. From 1976 until 2007, excavation continued under Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr., professor in the Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2008, the excavation has been under the directorship of Nicholas Cahill, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Some of the important finds from the site of Sardis are housed in the Archaeological Museum of Manisa, including Late Roman mosaics and sculpture, a helmet from the mid 6th century BC, and pottery from various periods.