Spear-Won Land: Sardis from the King's Peace to the Peace of Apamea ed. by Andrea M. Berlin and Paul J. Kosmin (review)

Spear-Won Land represents the collaborative work of the Hellenistic Sardis Project between 2014 and 2017, during which the editors gathered archaeologists, historians, and numismatists to discuss the past few decades of research into Classical and Hellenistic Sardis. Their workshops were clearly very fruitful, not just in a comprehensive revision of the city's physical and political history, but also in situating Sardis within its broader ancient landscape. This volume will be indispensable for anyone studying the history or archaeology of Sardis, or western Anatolia in general. It also provides a readable education in archaeological methods and how to reinterpret a site with a long but partial excavation history, and for which there are also a few significant but potentially misleading literary sources.

There are three notable themes in the volume: one, using ceramics to tell the story of how the people of Sardis weathered political changes; two, changes to Sardis' city-plan; three, the date when Sardis became a polis.

A city with as storied a past as Sardis—the home of Gyges and Croesus, captured by Cyrus the Great, regional capital of Persian and Hellenistic empires—seems as if it should have plenty of monumental archaeology in which we can see the fortunes of these powers. It does not, or at least not yet. Instead, excavators have found houses, workshops, fortifications, terraces and pavements, and all the detritus of daily life in these places. Thus pottery assemblages become one of the main types of evidence for the cultural affiliation and political leanings of the inhabitants. It is rare that one reads a book about an imperial city and ends up thinking through its political culture by visualizing how the people living there ate their dinners and drank their wine, but with this volume we get to do just that.

In 1983, George Hanfmann published Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times: Results of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis 1958–1975, and in it described the evolution of Lydian, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Sardis. His city started as a fortified Lydian lower-town settlement along the Pactolus River connected to a palatial acropolis; over successive periods settlement expanded up the acropolis slopes. For him, the key moment of the Hellenistic city phase was the siege by Antiochus III (215–213 bc), exemplified by the 1963 discovery of inscribed royal letters referring to that event, and apparently correlating with Polybius' account. Over the decades since, excavators at Sardis came to realize that Hanfmann's Lydian town centre was a suburb, and that the exterior face of the fortification wall was actually the interior. They had to completely flip the city plan inside out. Their evaluation is still ongoing, but the emerging picture has a much larger Lydian city than previously thought, most of it buried deep under the Roman and Hellenistic sections. The Persian town was vastly reduced from Hanfmann's plan, with the inhabitants pushed outside the walls. The Hellenistic period saw people returning to their old abandoned neighbourhoods, including the palatial terraces. Antiochus' siege does not show up in the archaeological record as once thought, but the date of the Persian destruction is much clearer than before. All the contributors to this volume are dealing with the ramifications of this shift in perspective.

For the researchers at Sardis now, the big moment in the archaeology is no longer the siege, but the point when the city became a polis. Almost every chapter addresses this question in some form. Like the city plan, the date of poliadization has also been significantly revised. Scholars using literary and epigraphic evidence from outside Sardis posited that it became a polis in the 220s bc. Excavators looking at the material evidence for the Sardians' own behaviour have moved that date up several decades...