Attalid Urban Revival in the City Center of Sardis: ca. 215–160 BCE

This summer I had the privilege of working at the archaeological site of Sardis in Türkiye to investigate the intra-urban migration that followed the Treaty of Apamea in 188 BCE, in which forces of Rome, Pergamon, and Rhodes defeated those of the Seleukid Empire, forcing them to retreat from several sites and regions in Western Anatolia including Sardis, their former administrative center and westernmost edge.

The period of occupation at Sardis under the Seleukid Empire before the Treaty of Apamea has been well-studied in recent years—culminating in a major edited volume published in 2019—but the period immediately following it has remained more elusive. We know from ancient authors like Polybius, Livy, and Appian that Sardis was part of the territory that was ceded to the ruling dynasty at Pergamon known as the Attalids, and archaeological evidence from excavations at the bottom of the city—which is mostly built up around Mount Tmolus—show that occupation in those neighborhoods remains largely undisturbed throughout this exchange of political leadership. Examinations of the pottery from the bottom of the city has also shown that this change in leadership and influence can be tracked not only through the textual record of recorded by ancient political elites, but also through much more mundane adaptations in things the dishes which people used for everyday eating. Following the Treaty of Apamea, local potters at Sardis begin producing table settings of four different dishes—two different styles of bowls, one style of cup, and one style of plate/saucer—that were modeled directly off table settings first produced in Pergamon in the mid-2nd century BCE.

Surveys of archaeological material in both the city’s the rural hinterlands and the urban center have suggested that in the period following the Treaty of Apamea, the population contracts into the urban center, migrating away from the rural hinterlands and concentrating inside the city. My research this summer began with an examination of this intra-urban migration, looking to investigate this central question: why did people move into the city during this period?

In order to proceed with this project, I began by examining the material from the two primary areas of the site where substantial occupation in the Hellenistic period (ca. mid-4th century through mid-1st century BCE) had been found: a few buildings in the lower city, and a portion of a building in the upper city. While there have been no new excavations in the lower city since the last major publication of this period, several new rooms and buildings have been excavated in the upper city in the seven years since it had last been studied. Importantly for the sake of my study, two observations emerged from the excavation data: first, while the lower city remained continuously occupied and relatively undisturbed from the period of rule by the Seleukids through the changing of hands to the Attalids—life goes on as usual—the upper city is abandoned midway through the period of Seleukid rule, well before the Treaty of Apamea; its occupants leave their homes for long enough that the roofs collapse in place, their houses emptied of most of their valuables. This is particularly striking because the excavated neighborhood which appears to have been abandoned is right in the heart of the city, where the old palace of the Lydian kings from just a few centuries prior once stood looking over the ridge over the Hermus river plain and stretching out across the monumental burial mounds of ancient royals and elites. This neighborhood would have been, in many respects, prime real estate for those dwelling in the city, so the fact that some sort of conflict or catastrophe caused its inhabitants to flee while the rest of the lower city remained unscathed points to an intentional, targeted maneuver rather than a random accident or natural disaster. The best historical testimony that may account for this targeted abandonment comes from Polybius’s account of a siege in 215–213 BCE, when Seleukid ruler Antiochus III laid siege to the city and its then-ruler, his cousin Achaeus—perhaps in a time of siege, only the citadel mattered to the besieging army.

The second observation that emerged from the study of this excavation data was that this neighborhood in the upper city, which had been abandoned for some time—likely on account of this siege—was eventually reoccupied in the mid-second century, after the Attalids had taken control of Sardis following the Treaty of Apamea. This second observation is especially important for contextualizing the intra-urban migration that formed the point of departure for this study. It appears that around the same time that people were emptying the rural hinterlands of Sardis and entering into the city, these prestige neighborhoods—once left abandoned to rot, not even reoccupied after the siege had lifted—were repopulated.

Both the repopulation of the neighborhood of the upper city and the depopulation of the rural hinterlands correspond with the construction of some major civic monuments, including the large stone-seated theater, built into the same natural ridge as the upper city neighborhood. If these two contraction events can be seen as related, this may indicate that the depopulation of the rural hinterlands was driven by forces similar to those encouraging the reoccupation of long-storied neighborhoods—even ones which had presumably marred the upper city as a living monument to the destruction of the siege: municipal, infrastructural investment. The Attalids, who received an enormous amount of territory overnight following the Treaty of Apamea, opted in most cases to exercise control over their territory with taxation, rather than military power, which they then funneled directly into local civic institutions. By investing in major public works like the stone theater, the Attalids produced new incentives for people to live inside their cities and in relative peace with their new rulers.

While this project remains ongoing—with plans for future conference presentations and hopeful publication—the 2025 research season did produce a few preliminary digital publications as a part of this project. These digital publications include 3 new locally-produced ceramic wares from Sardis and 85 new ceramic vessels belonging to these ware groups, published on the open-access Levantine Ceramics Project database:

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Preparing ceramics for digital publication.
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Staging photography for Pergamene-style table settings produced at Sardis.
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My collaborator, Caroline Everts (university of Michigan) and myself holding some 4th-century skyphoi.
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Caroline and I examining ceramics from past excavation seasons in the storage depots.

I would like to express my utmost gratitude to the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative for their generous support of summer grant funding for my research project, as well as the continued support and collaboration of the Harvard-Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis. This work would not have been possible without them.

Grant recipient: Hannah Hoffman