Changing Geographies of Power in Anatolia in the eighth century BCE – A View from Lydia
The records of the eighth century BCE feature a power struggle in Anatolia: territorial polities clashing particularly in the (central-)southern region. In this paper, I look outside this zone to the west—the region considered to be a power-vacuum at the time—to discuss preliminary evidence for Lydia’s participation in and response to this competition by shaping western Anatolian political geography. This evidence has only recently started emerge from the Lydian capital Sardis: a ruling elite center (Lydian III) encircled by monumental urban terraces. Introducing its intermediate position within the long sequence of large-scale building programs and its role in shaping the settlement in at least two sociospatial tiers, I argue that the Lydian III center manifests the stabilization of ruling elite in Sardis. A comparative regional assessment further reveals a hybrid approach to this center’s production. On the one hand, its conspicuously dominant character within a multi-tier organization resembles that of the major citadels in (central-)southern Anatolia; thus, this center underlines the Lydian elite’s continued emulation of royal ideologies for centralized governance and power display. On the other hand, the use of standalone terraces to demarcate the Lydian III elite center, instead of citadel fortifications, is more akin to the spatial modeling of sacred spaces in the Aegean, while the closest parallels for these terraces’ polygonal construction technique are found in the refuge citadels that proliferated western Anatolia from the eighth century BCE onwards. Collectively, these observations offer a working hypothesis: Lydian III ruling elite directed their initial ambitions to the west, where most settlements were dispersed and undefended, because the rival polities to their east formed an insurmountable power block against eastward expansion. Besides providing a motivation for the new citadel constructions on the western coast, this scenario foregrounds the previously unsuspected role of Lydian actors in shaping the eighth century BCE Anatolian geographies of power and submits a more gradual background to the Mermnad Dynasty’s expansionist actions in the following century, which are otherwise characterized as suddenly aggressive based on Herodotean accounts.