Sardis

   One of the more important cities in ancient Anatolia and a provincial capital of the Persian Empire. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Sardis (or Sardes or Sardeis) was established by migrating Greeks sometime in the period of circa 1200 to 900 b.c., and remnants of early Greek pottery in the ruins seem to confirm this. Later the town was settled by the Cimmerians, an Indo-European people from the Black Sea area. By the early seventh century b.c. Sardis was the capital of the kingdom of Lydia, which issued the world's first-known coins. When the Achaemenid Persians, based in Iran and Iraq, conquered Lydia in the 500s b.c., they made Sardis the capital of their province of Sparda. A coalition of Anatolian and mainland Greeks burned the city in 498 during the anti-Persian revolt of the Anatolian Greeks; but the Persians soon recovered and rebuilt it. In 334 b.c., during the early stages of his conquest of Persia, Alexander the Great occupied Sardis and established one of his coin mints there. Later, after the wars of Alexander's generals, the city became part of the Seleucid Empire, centered in Mesopotamia. In the following century, however, Sardis came under the control of the kingdom of Per-gamum in western Anatolia, and then it passed to the Romans, who absorbed much of Anatolia and made it their province of Asia.

   See also: Anatolia; Greeks; Persian Empire