The map of Iron Age Anatolia (ca. 1200-550 BCE, Turkey) is dotted by territorial kingdoms that rose and were subsumed into larger political entities throughout its history. Current archaeological narratives commonly place Lydia into this scene quite late in the Iron Age with the rise of its Mermnad elite in the seventh century BCE. Their power is well attested by the rapid expansion of their influence in Anatolia, as well as by their ambitious buildings programs that monumentalized their capital city Sardis. Among these programs, monumental urban terrace platforms hold a unique position, for they regularized the rugged topography of a naturally elevated district at the heart of Sardis, converting it into a visibly dominant promontory to house the Lydian palace. Until recently there were no precedents for these enormous man-made investments, hence the narrative of the Mermnad elite’s late and fast emergence and the reconstruction of Sardis as an agglomeration of small sites before their time. The fresh discovery of a long sequence of large-scale constructions (2000-700 BCE) in the city’s elite precinct now casts doubt on this narrative. In this dissertation, I study these early monumental constructions along with the later terraces to investigate the course of Lydian elite placemaking and their wider implications for Lydia’s place in Iron Age Anatolia. This research is multi-scalar, expanding out from a detailed study of architecture, to the place of terraces within the socio-spatial fabric of diachronic settlements at Sardis, and finally to wider regional Anatolian context. I begin with the examination of the corpus of urban terrace constructions in Sardis and their architectural design principles and dating evidence. Next, I compare the terraces to constructions from domestic neighborhoods as well as other Mermnad elite structures. Their scalar facets—large size, costly materials, and large labor requirements—mark them as monumental in each building episode. I consider symbolic and experiential facets using a variety of theoretical frameworks—memory, social submission, performance, and domination—to demonstrate how these terraces shaped their socio-spatial environments through ongoing claims of an old central precinct. This was achieved by introducing architectural novelties as well as more formality and regularity, employing transformative labor as a means of public spectacle and creating built representations of spatial control and domination. At the same time, I show the extent to which these practices foreshadow Mermnad elite placemaking ideologies. Thus, this research marks Lydian constructions in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE as productions of a previously unregistered early Lydian elite. I conclude by contextualizing early Lydian placemaking practices within Anatolia’s broader socio-political spheres. This study reveals terracing to demarcate elite space as a Lydian mode of placemaking and that in timing and ideology it followed the culture-political trajectories of Anatolia—by peer-polity competition—more so than those of the Aegean. As a result, I acknowledge the deeper history of the ruling elite in Lydia, one that reverses the narrative of a sudden, late, and rapid development fostered by the Mermnads. This study, thus, makes a place for Lydia in the Iron Age maps of Anatolia two centuries earlier than has been previously believed.

La présente thèse vise à apporter des éclaircissements sur la réapparition du souci défensif, sa matérialisation et son évolution en Anatolie occidentale et centrale au début du premier millénaire av. J.-C. (Xe-VIe s.). Le territoire soumis à l’examen comprend la Phrygie, la boucle de l’Halys, la Carie, la Lydie, l’Ionie, l’Eolide et la Troade. Cette étude s’intéresse en premier lieu aux différentes méthodes de fortification utilisées au cours de cette période. Par l’examen des principales caractéristiques architecturales des murs de défense (techniques de construction, dispositifs défensifs), cette étude cherche à déterminer de quelle manière ces nouvelles constructions s’inscrivent dans la tradition architecturale anatolienne et dans quelle mesure leurs concepteurs contribuèrent à l’évolution de celle-ci en adoptant et en transformant les méthodes de fortification qui en sont issues. La construction d’un rempart, parce qu’elle impliquait de nombreux acteurs, était un fait de société majeur. Par leur conception, les techniques utilisées pour leur construction, leur emprise dans le paysage, les murailles sont des monuments chargés de symboles et des témoins privilégiés de l’histoire des sociétés qui les ont construites et perfectionnées. Au-delà des considérations archéologiques, cette étude s’attache donc aussi à replacer la construction de fortifications dans le contexte militaire mouvementé de l’Anatolie préclassique et tente également d’évaluer l’impact d’un tel projet de construction dans l’histoire politique et sociale des populations anatoliennes de l’âge du fer. / This thesis aims to shed light on the reappearance of defensive concern, its materialization and its evolution in Western and Central Anatolia in the Early First Millennium BC. (10th-6th c.). The area under consideration includes Phrygia, the Halys bend, Caria, Lydia, Ionia, Aeolis and the Troad. This study focuses primarily on the various fortification methods used during this period. By examining the main architectural features of defensive walls (building techniques, defensive components), this study seeks to determine how these new constructions inherited from the Anatolian architectural tradition and how their designers contributed to make it evolve by adopting and transforming some of its principles. The construction of a wall, because it involved many actors, was also major social phenomenon. Iron Age fortifications sometimes bear witness to the history of the various populations who built and perfected them. Hence, beyond archaeological considerations, this study also aims to place the construction of fortifications in the military context of the tumultuous pre-classical Anatolia. It also attempts to evaluate the impact of such a construction project on the sociopolitical history of Anatolian Iron Age populations: Greeks, Lydians, Phrygians and Carians.