SARDIS, more correctly SARDES (alLapSEts), the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, the seat of a conventus under the Roman Empire, and the metropolis of the province Lydia in later Roman and Byzantine times, was situated in the middle Hermus valley, at the foot of Mt. Tmolus, a steep and lofty spur of which formed the citadel. It was about 21 m. S. of the Hermus. The earliest reference to Sardis is in Alcman (Bergk, Fr. 24, c. 65o B.c.), in the Iliad the name Hyde seems to be given to the city of the Maeonian (i.e., Lydian) chiefs, and in later times, Hyde was said to be the older name of Sardis, or the name of its citadel. It is, however, more probable that Sardis was not the original capital of the Maeonians, but that it became so amid the changes which produced the powerful Lydian empire of the 8th century B.C. The city was captured by the Cimmerians in the 7th century, by the Persians and by the Athenians in the 6th, and by Antiochus the Great at the end of the 3rd century. Once at least, under the emperor Tiberius, in A.D. 17, it was destroyed by an earthquake; but it was always rebuilt, and was one of the great cities of Asia Minor till the later Byzantine period. As one of the Seven Churches of Asia, it was addressed by the author of the Apocalypse in terms which seem to imply that its population was notoriously soft and faint-hearted. Its im portance was due, first to its military strength, secondly to its situation on an important highway leading from the interior to the Aegean coast, and thirdly to its commanding the wide and fertile plain of the Hermus.
The early Lydian kingdom was far advanced in the industrial arts (see LYDIA) , and Sardis was the chief seat of its manila factures. The most important of these trades was the manu facture and dyeing of delicate woollen stuffs and carpets.
In the Hellenistic and Roman periods Sardis was eclipsed by Pergamum (the Attalid capital), by Ephesus (the capital of the province of Asia) and probably also by Smyrna. After Con stantinople 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. It still, however, retained its titular su premacy and continued to be the seat of the metropolitan bishop of the province of Lydia, formed in A.D. 295. It is enumerated as third, after Ephesus and Smyrna, in the list of cities of the Thracesian thema given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the loth century; but in the actual history of the next four centuries it plays a part very inferior to Magnesia ad Sipylum and Phila delphia (see ALA-SHEHR), which have retained their pre-eminence in the district. The Hermus valley began to suffer from the in
roads of the Seljuk Turks about the end of the nth century; but the successes of the Greek general Philocales in 1118 relieved the district for the time, and the ability of the Comneni, together with the gradual decay of the Seljuk power, retained it in the Byzantine dominions. The country round Sardis was frequently ravaged both by Christians and by Turks during the 13th cen tury. Soon after 1301 the Seljuk amirs overran the whole of the Hermus and Cayster valleys, and a fort on the citadel of Sardis was handed over to them by treaty in 5306. Finally in 1390 Philadelphia, which had for some time been an independent Christian city, surrendered to Sultan Bayezid's mixed army of Ottoman Turks and Byzantine Christians, and the Seljuk power in the Hermus valley was merged in the Ottoman empire. The latest reference to the city of Sardis relates its capture (and probable destruction) by Timur in 1402. Its site is now practically deserted.
The ruins of Sardis, so far as they are now visible, are chiefly of the Roman time; but though few ancient sites offered better hope of results, the necessity for heavy initial expenditure was a deterrent (e.g., to H. Schliemann). On the banks of the Pactolus two columns of a great Ionic temple, now known to be that of Cybele-Artemis were still standing. More than one attempt to excavate this temple, the last by G. Dennis in 1882, was made and prematurely brought to an end by lack of funds. In 1910 1914 and also in 1922, the temple site and part of the necropolis were studied by H. C. Butler and others, of the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis.
See reports in Am. Journal of Archaeology, 1911-27, and the volumes of Sardis, especially I. and II. (H. C. Butler) on the history of the excavations down to 1914, and VI. pts. 1-2 (E. Littmann-W. H. Buck ler) on the Lydian inscriptions; results and bibliography in Pauly Wissowa R. Enc. XIII. 2123 f. (Biirchner-Deeters-J. Keil) ; for the city's history in early Christian times, W. M. Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches (1904), V. Schultze, Altchristliche Sttidte II. 2,145 f. (1926).