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Synagogue & gymnasium complex
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Located 80 km (50 mi.) east of Ephesus on a spur of Mount Tmolus, Sardis overlooked the Hermus River valley. She was at the western end of a road that stretched all the way to the Persian city of Susa. Famous as the ancient capital of King Croesus, Sardis was the first city to mint gold and silver coins and claimed to be the first to discover the art of dyeing wool.

Because her acropolis was built on a hill with perpendicular walls 457 m. (1,500 ft.) high, Sardis was virtually impregnable to attack. Nevertheless, her defenders’ overconfidence and inattention twice caused her to fall to enemies.

As the capital of the kingdom of Lydia, Sardis fell to Cyrus in 546 BCE. Later, she passed to the Seleucids, then to the Attalid kings (whose capital was Pergamum). At last, in 133 BCE, Sardis was willed to Rome along with the rest of the Attalid kingdom. An earthquake destroyed Sardis in 17 CE, but aid from Tiberius refinanced her reconstruction.

The acropolis of Sardis, with its nearly perpendicular slopes, seemed impossible to scale. Yet its composition was not solid rock, but detritus—tightly compressed gravel that crumbles at the touch. Once famous throughout the ancient world capital of Lydia, Sardis had fallen on tough times and in the first century was heading for extinction. She “had a name for being alive” (Revelation 3:1) but was as good as dead. In later centuries, her impregnable fortress was cast down, not by armies, but by the numerous earthquakes in the area. Hemer describes the site as it appears to a modern visitor:

The erosion of these precipices has produced a theatrical landscape of extraordinary strangeness. The main hill is flanked by isolated earthen pinnacles, each several hundred feet high, and capped each with a solitary tree or fragment of masonry. It appears that the roots and stones have formed a resistant apex, yet it is scarcely conceivable that erosional features of such size could have formed in geological time so short as to be related to the life-span even of a succession of trees. There is however other evidence of erosion on a remarkable scale. It has certainly affected the extent of the summit-site, for at its least exposed side the late Byzantine fortifications are in places overhanging an abyss…. [T]he present summit is a mere fragment. Most of the original Sardis has surely fallen over the edge. —Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting (Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 11), (Sheffield, England: JSOT, 1986), 129-130.

The gray elements in the image above show fragments archaeologists have found of the ancient city. Click here to view the site without these enhancements.

Sardis is adjacent to the Turkish village of Sartmahmut, near the city of Salihli (2000 population: 83,137).