Lydia & Persia

The Prophecy

Croesus, King of Lydia, sent envoys to the oracles at Delphi and at the shrine of Amphiaraos. Herodotos gives their question and the answer:

“Croesus, king of Lydia and other nations, believing that here are the only true places of divination among men, endows you with such gifts as your wisdom deserves. And now he asks you whether he is to send an army against the Persians, and whether he is to add an army of allies.” Such was their inquiry; and the judgment given to Croesus by each of the two oracles was the same: namely, that if he should send an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire.
-Herodotos, Histories 1.53

Croesus liked the answer.

The Oriental Empires about 600 B.C. (463K) [p.8] Shepherd, William. Historical Atlas. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.

Lydia occupied the valley of the Hermos river in western Asia Minor, the Aegean side of modern Turkey. Its capital, Sardes (modern Sart, near Salihli; the Latin form Sardis is also common), stood where the Pactolos, a small tributary of the Hermos, comes down from Mount Tmolos.

The Lydians spoke an Anatolian language of the same family as Hittite, written in an alphabet derived from a Greek one. Just over a hundred inscriptions survive, and fewer than thirty run to more than a few words. Most date to the fifth and fourth centuries BC (Melchert 2010). For most of their history, however, they are known through Greek writers, above all Herodotos, whose first book is the fullest ancient account of the kingdom.

The Mermnad Dynasty

Croesus was a member of the Mermnad dynasty that began with Gyges. According to Herodotos: Gyges was the bodyguard of King Kandaules. The king insisted on showing him the queen naked; the queen found out and gave Gyges the choice of killing the king or dying himself. He killed Kandaules in his bed and took the queen and the kingdom, and Delphi confirmed his rule with the warning that vengeance would come in the fifth generation, which was Croesus (Herodotos, Histories 1.8 to 1.13).

Gyges is attested in Assyrian royal inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, as "Gugu of Luddi" (Gyges of Lydia) who sent envoys to the royal Assyrian city of Nineveh. The same inscriptions record that he died fighting the Cimmerians, a nomadic people who had come into Anatolia from the north, probably around 644 BC.

Gyges son Ardys faced a continuation of the Cimmerian threat. Herodotos writes, "the Kimmerians driven from their abodes by the nomad Scythians came to Asia and took Sardis except the citadel" (Herodotos, Histories 1.15).

The king who made Lydia a regional power was Alyattes, Croesus's father, whose reign is conventionally placed at about 610 to 560 BC. He drove the Cimmerians out of Asia Minor, fought a long war with the Greek city of Miletos, and pushed the kingdom's eastern frontier to the river Halys, where it met the Medes. Herodotos reports that the war with the Medes ended in a battle interrupted by an eclipse:

"in the sixth year a battle took place in which it happened, when the fight had begun, that suddenly the day became night. And this change of the day Thales the Milesian had foretold to the Ionians laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. The Lydians however and the Medes, when they saw that it had become night instead of day, ceased from their fighting and were much more eager both of them that peace should be made between them." 
Herodotos, Histories 1.74. 

The eclipse is usually identified with the total solar eclipse of 28 May 585 BC. To cement the peace, Alyattes gave his daughter Aryenis to Astyages, son of the Median king. Croesus's sister therefore became queen of the Medes.

Herodotos gives Alyattes a reign of fifty-seven years (Histories 1.25). On the conventional dates he died about 560 BC, and Croesus inherited the throne.

 Tomb of Alyattes. Bin Tepe, large tumulus. Public Domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

Alyattes's tomb still stands at Bin Tepe  ('a thousand mounds'), the royal cemetery north of Sardes across the Hermos, where about 115 mounds survive. Herodotos calls it the largest work in Lydia, gives its circuit as six stades and two hundred feet, and says that tradesmen, artisans, and prostitutes paid for it. Five boundary stones on top recorded each group's share, and the prostitutes' share was the largest (Herodotos, Histories 1.93). He adds that daughters of ordinary Lydian families earned their dowries this way, a claim historians treat with caution as a Greek report of foreign customs. The mound measures about 355 m across and 63 m high, close to his figures.

The Coin

Greek tradition credited the Lydians with the invention of coinage, and archaeological evidence places Lydia at the center of its emergence in western Anatolia. Herodotos writes that "they were the first of men, so far as we know, who struck and used coin of gold or silver; and also they were the first retail-traders" (Herodotos, Histories 1.94).

Lydia, Sardes. Croesus (conventionally ca. 560 to 546 BC), or continued under his Persian successors. AR half-stater or siglos (5.33g, 17mm). Circa 560 to 546 BC, or somewhat later.

Obv: confronted foreparts of a lion, right, and a bull, left, each with a foreleg extended toward the other.

Rev: two square incuse punches side by side, with irregular interior surfaces.

Ref: SNG Kayhan 1025; SNG von Aulock 2877.

The lion's head already appears on the electrum coins of Alyattes, some of which carry the Lydian legend WALWET, probably his name. A lion facing a bull is a traditional Near Eastern motif, and Kroll suggests Croesus adopted it as his personal badge; its precise meaning remains uncertain. The two incuse squares on the reverse were left by punches that a hammer drove into the back of the blank, forcing the metal into the die below. The practice goes back to the earliest electrum coins.

This coin is traditionally associated with Croesus, whose wealth became so famous that more than 2500 years later “rich as Croesus” remains an expression. However, coins of this type may have continued to be struck at Sardes after Croesus was gone. (See: Collins Dictionary)

King Croesus

Herodotos gives Croesus a reign of fourteen years, which puts his accession at about 560 BC. Wallace (2016) argues from other passages in Herodotos that Croesus already ruled in the 580s, Cahill et al. 2025 also smake arguments for a longer reign.

Beginning with Ephesos, he brought the Greek cities of the Aegean coast (Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians) under tribute. Herodotos adds that he subdued nearly all the peoples west of the Halys, with the Cilicians and Lycians excepted. (Herodotos, Histories 1.26 to 1.28) He advertised his wealth in the Greek world with dedications at Delphi that Herodotos itemizes:

"he melted down a vast quantity of gold, and of it he wrought half-plinths ... and their number was one hundred and seventeen. Of these four were of pure gold weighing two talents and a half each (~65kg each), and others of gold alloyed with silver weighing two talents (~52kg). And he caused to be made also an image of a lion of pure gold weighing ten talents (~250 kg)" -Herodotos, Histories 1.50

Croesus called in the electrum coinage and replaced it with two coinages of refined metal, one gold and one silver. The gold stater was struck first at about 10.7g and later at about 8.1g; the silver stater weighed about 10.7g, with fractions from a third down to a forty-eighth.

When Cyrus overthrew Astyages, Croesus lost both a powerful ally and his brother-in-law. Herodotos attributes his decision to attack Persia to several motives: a desire to avenge Astyages, ambition for additional territory, and confidence in the oracle. (Herodotos, Histories 1.73) Croesus consulted Delphi and was told, Herodotos says, that if he marched against the Persians he would destroy a great empire (Herodotos, Histories 1.53).

Clay cuneiform tablet. The Nabonidus Chronicle at the British Museum. Image used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

The Prophecy Fulfilled

Croesus crossed the Halys and fought Cyrus to a draw at Pteria in Cappadocia. He then withdrew to Sardes and dismissed his mercenaries for the winter (Herodotos, Histories 1.76 to 1.77). Cyrus followed at once, defeated the Lydian cavalry on the plain before the city, and took Sardes after a siege of fourteen days (Herodotos, Histories 1.80 to 1.84). Herodotos closes the account by noting that Croesus had reigned fourteen years and had ended a great empire, as the oracle said: his own (Herodotos, Histories 1.86).

When Croesus later complained to Delphi, the Pythia (the priestess who spoke the oracle) answered that he should have asked which empire was meant (Herodotos, Histories 1.91). Excavators at Sardes have found the destruction layer of this siege. In the Lydian palace it included the burned remains of a middle-aged man surrounded by arrowheads, with nine worn silver croeseids nearby (Cahill et al. 2025).

A Babylonian text, the Nabonidus Chronicle (British Museum 35382, a copy probably made in the third or second century BC), records that in the ninth year of King Nabonidus, 547/6 BC, Cyrus crossed the Tigris below Arbela, marched against a country whose name is damaged on the tablet, killed its king, and stationed a garrison there. Scholars have long restored the name as Lydia, which gives the conventional date for the fall of Sardes.

Since 1997 others have read the first sign as the beginning of Urartu, a kingdom in eastern Anatolia; on that reading Sardes may have fallen several years later, in the late 540s (Rollinger and Kellner 2019). The excavators of Sardes continue to date the destruction to about 547 BC (Cahill et al. 2025). If the entry does concern Lydia, its statement that Cyrus killed the king contradicts the Greek tradition that Croesus survived.

 An Attic red-figure amphora by the painter Myson in the Louvre, usually dated to about 500 to 490 BC, shows Croesus seated on the pyre with a libation bowl while the servant, named Euthymos, holds two torches. Image terms of use are here.

Herodotos has Cyrus place Croesus on a pyre, and has Apollo send rain to put it out, after which Croesus lives on as Cyrus's adviser (Herodotos, Histories 1.86 to 1.90). The poet Bacchylides, in an ode of 468 BC, a generation before Herodotos wrote, has Croesus build the pyre himself and mount it with his wife and daughters. Zeus quenches the fire with a rain cloud, and Apollo carries the king to the Hyperboreans, a blessed people of the far north (Bacchylides, Ode 3.23 to 3.62). The Myson amphora is older still, which makes it the earliest known version of the story. Modern historians treat the rescue as legend and are divided on whether Croesus survived.

Croesus' kingdom was destroyed, but the monetary innovation associated with his reign was useful enough that his conquerors retained it. Kroll notes that Persian authorities continued the lion-and-bull coinage for roughly another generation before Darius replaced it with explicitly Persian royal types around 515 BC.

References

• Cahill, Nicholas, et al. "A New Find of Croeseid Coins from Sardis." Hesperia 94, no. 2 (2025): 143-183.

• Cahill, Nicholas, and John H. Kroll. "New Archaic Coin Finds at Sardis." American Journal of Archaeology 109, no. 4 (2005): 589-617.

• Kroll, John H. "The Coins of Sardis." In The Lydians and Their World, edited by N. D. Cahill. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2010.

• Melchert, H. Craig. "Lydian Language and Inscriptions." In The Lydians and Their World, edited by N. D. Cahill. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2010.

• Rollinger, Robert, and Angelika Kellner. "Once More the Nabonidus Chronicle (BM 35382) and Cyrus' Campaign in 547 BC." Ancient West and East 18 (2019): 153-176.

• Wallace, Robert W. "Redating Croesus: Herodotean Chronologies, and the Dates of the Earliest Coinages." Journal of Hellenic Studies 136 (2016): 168-181.