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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46374 |
| Date | 17 June 2023 |
| Creators | Eren, Guzin |
| Contributors | Berlin, Andrea M. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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