摘要: Justification of Outstanding Universal Value　　Sardis holds a unique place in the history of Greece and the Near East. As tradesmen, patrons and conquerors, the Lydians played a vital role in the cultu

Justification of Outstanding Universal Value

　　Sardis holds a unique place in the history of Greece and the Near East. As tradesmen, patrons and conquerors, the Lydians played a vital role in the cultural interchanges between Greece and the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Near East. The Greeks came to see this familiar yet foreign culture as the prototypical “other:” wealthy, generous, economically and militarily dominant, but also ostentatious, vain, and sexually perverse; and they developed their own independent western identity in part as distinct from such Oriental absolutists. The devastating fall of Sardis to the Persians in 547 BC only demonstrated again that gold does not guarantee happiness, a theme explored in Herodotus’ Histories. The Lydians thus played a pivotal role in the development of the divide between “west” and “east,” a divide that may have begun even earlier in the Bronze Age and yet still haunts us today.

　　The archaeological site of Sardis documents this unique position. Although Sardis is mentioned frequently by Classical authors, we have very few written documents from the Lydians themselves; this makes the archaeological remains all the more important. The monumental Lydian fortification, unparalleled outside Mesopotamia, might reflect the Lydian kings’ aspirations to build a city worthy of the great Near Eastern capitals such as Nineveh or Babylon. The palace reflects an institution entirely foreign to the Greeks. The Lydian gold atelier attests the earliest known separation of electrum into pure gold and silver, and the extraordinary wealth of the city.

　　The later buildings of Sardis demonstrate the continuing importance of the city. Its magnificent Hellenistic temple aimed to place the city among the great Ionian Metropoleis of Ephesus, Samos, and Miletus. Churches, synagogue, temples and dedications to local Anatolian, Greek, and Roman deities attest the polytheistic nature of the city throughout its history, while the inscriptions in a multitude of languages — Lydian, Carian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and at least one completely unknown script — demonstrate the multiethnic nature of Sardian society. Houses from the Lydian through the Late Roman period form a unique record of the cultural adaptations and changes.

　　The royal cemetery of Bin Tepe remains one of the most distinctive and evocative landscapes in Turkey. Its monumental tumuli proclaim and demonstrate the royal power of Sardis as did the pyramids of Egypt or the Eastern Qing tombs of China, and the vast necropolis that grew up around these royal graves is among the largest in the world. Although most famous for the tumuli, the region is the home of a major, newly-discovered Bronze Age kingdom contemporary with the Mycenaean Greeks, the Trojans, and the Hittites, with a network of pristine ancient sites dating to the second millennium BC, and of occupation sites dating from the Paleolithic through the modern era. The already-ancient kingdom was perhaps a landscape of memory for the Lydians a thousand years later, just as Sardis remained a landscape of memory for later generations in the Hellenistic, Roman, and later eras.

　　Criterion (i):Sardis was one of the preeminent cities of the ancient world, the capital of an empire that ruled western Anatolia, the birthplace of coinage, and the home of Croesus, whose name became synonymous with unimaginable wealth. The city was an unusual example of urban planning, the steep natural landscape monumentalized and regularized by rhythmic, crisply built terraces that anticipated the layout of Hellenistic Pergamon, and ringed by the largest fortification outside Mesopotamia. Sardis houses one of the largest Ionic temples in the world, arguably the most picturesque Ionic temple surviving today. Its well-preserved Roman buildings include a monumental bath-gymnasium building and the largest synagogue of the ancient world. The Lydian tumulus cemetery at Bin Tepe is the site of some of the largest tumuli in the world, rivaling the pyramids of Giza for sheer monumentality.

　　Criterion (ii): Located at the border between the Greek world and the great civilizations of central Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Near East, Sardis had strong ties to both Eastern and Western cultural traditions. Throughout its long history it was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual area of fruitful cultural interchange. The Lydians made significant contributions to the development of ancient monumental architecture, town planning, and the minor arts. The lower city was ranged along the steep slopes and natural terraces north of the acropolis. The Lydian kings enclosed this city by a massive fortification, many times larger than any contemporary fortification in Anatolia, or indeed anywhere outside the great cities of Mesopotamia, Nineveh, Nimrud, or Babylon. They drew on Near Eastern and Greek architectural traditions, such as the construction of monumental masonry terraces like those of Nineveh or Khorsabad, almost unknown in the Greek world until that time, to express the social order in the city’s layout. It seems likely that as they grew from a local kingdom to a powerful empire and came into contact with the empires of Mesopotamia, the Lydians looked to these eastern metropoleis for models of what an imperial capital should look like. Their terraces in turn became prototypes for the new capital city of Pasargadae in Iran, begun by Cyrus the Great after he had conquered Sardis, and probably built in large part by Lydian and Ionian masons. A major sanctuary of Sardis was that of Cybele, and the Lydians were instrumental in the introduction of this Anatolian mother goddess to the west. Indigenous Lydian traditions continued well into later centuries. As the inventors of coinage, the Lydians began a system that remains central to most subsequent monetary economies up to the present. In addition to Lydians, Carians, Greeks, and other ethnic groups it had a substantial Jewish population, and its Roman synagogue is the largest in the ancient world.

　　Criteriuon (iii):Sardis was the capital and only city of the Lydians. While Lydians were settled widely throughout western Anatolia, no other city is so directly associated with this vanished civilization. Unlike Greek, Roman, or many other ancient cultures, Lydian remains are peculiarly concentrated in this one location. Since the surviving written histories come primarily from the records of other cultures, the material culture of Sardis plays an essential role in our understanding of this ancient civilization.