Thyatira

Write to the angel of the church in Thyatira and say, "Here is the message of the Son of God who has eyes like a burning flame and feet like burnished bronze: I knovv ali about you and how charitable you are; I knovv your faith and devotion and how much you put up with, and I knovv how you are stili making progress. Nevertheless, I have a complaint to make: you are encouraging the vvoman Jezebel who claims to be a prophetess, and by her teaching she is luring my servants avvay to commit the adultery of eating food vvhich has been sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to reform, but she is not vvilling to change her adulterous life. Now 1 anı consigning her 10 bed, and ali her partners in adultery to troubles that vvill test them severely, unless they repent of their practices; and I vvill see that her children die, so that ali the churches realise that it is I vvho search heart and loins and give each of you vvhat your behaviour deserves. But on the rest of you in Thyatira, ali of you vvho have not accepted this teaching or learnt the secrets of Satan, as they are called, I am not laying any special duty; but hold firmly on to vvhat you already have until I come. To those vvho prove victorious, and keep vvorking vvith me until the end, I vvill give the authority över the pagans vvhich I myself have been given by my Father, to rule them vvith an iron sceptre and shatter them like earthenvvare. And I vvill give him the Morning Star. If anyone has ears to hear, let him listen to vvhat the Spirit is saying to the churches."

The only struetures that remain from ancient Thyatira are a basilica and a portico, both of the late Roman era, vvhich vvere excavated in the Tepemezarlığı quarter in the late 1960s. The ruins cover a square area about 35 meters on a side, vvith column bases and drums and both Ionic and Corinthian capitals arrayed around the site along vvith other architectural fragments.

After looking at the basilica we head south from Akhisar on highvvay 555, headed for Salihli, a drive of 62 kilometers. Some 20 kilometers out of Akhisar we pass the village of Gölmarmara, and soon aftervvards we come vvithin site of the lake for vvhich it is named, Marmara Gölü, knovvn in antiquity as the Gygaean Lake. South of the lake we come to the region knovvn as Bin Tepe, the

Thousand Hills, vvhich takes its name from the huge tumuli that rise up above the plain, the burial mounds of the ancient Lydian kings and nobility.

Excavations in the Bin Tepe area have unearthed evidence of human occupation going back to ca. 2500 B.C., though the oldest settlement at nearby Sardis, capital of the Lydian kingdom, date back to no earlier ıhan ca. 1500 B.C. Hittite tablets record.that their king Tudhaliyas IV (r. 1250-1220 B.C.) led several cam-paigns in vvestern Anatolia against a nation called the Assuvva, vvho are believed to be the ancient Sardian tribe knovvn as the Asias. According to Herodotus, the continent of Asia vvas named after them. These are the same people vvhom Homer calls the Maeonians. They fought as allies of King Priam in the defense of Troy, coming from "the Gygaean Lake beneath Mount Tmolus." Hittite arehives of the same period also refer to a povverful seafar-ing people knovvn as the Akhiyavva, novv generally identified as the Achaians. Shards of imported Mycenaean pottery of the thir-teenth century B.C. found at Sardis do indicate a possible Greek nquest of the Lycian capital at about the same time as the fail of

Homeric Troy. Other sherds found at Sardis indicate that the site vvas occupied by an Hellenic people during the period 1200-900 B.C. and perhaps for another two centuries after that. This would support Greek tradition, which held that the first Hellenes to rule at Sardis were the Heraclidae, the self-proclaimed sons of Heracles, who supplanted a native dynasty that had originated before the Trojan War in the time of the Maeonians.

According to Herodotus, the Heraclidae "reigned for tvventy-two generations, a period in ali of fıve hundred and five years, son succeeding father right down the line to Candaules, son of Myrsus." The dynasty of the Heraclidae reigned at Sardis until ca. 685 B.C, when they were succeeded by the Mermnadae, descendants of a Lydian chieftain named Mermnad. The fırst of the Mermnadae was Gyges, who seized power from Candaules, the last of the Heraclidae, a story told by Herodotus in Book I of his Histories. The most prominent of the tumuli at Bin Tepe have been tradition-ally identified as the tombs of Gyges and two of his successors, Ardys and Alyattes. The largest of these is the so-called Tomb of Alyattes, vvhich is 355 meters in diameter and 73 meters high, with the royal burial chamber presumably somewhere at üıe core of the mound, though it stili eludes the excavators. Herodotus considered this tumulus to be "the greatest work of human hands in the world, apart from the Egyptian and the Babylonian," and he describes its construction in Book I of his Histories:

The base of this monument is built of huge stone blocks; the rest of it is a mound of earth. it was raised by the joint labour of the tradesmen, craftsmen, and prostitutes, and on the top of it there survived to my own day five stone pillars with inscriptions cut in them to show the amount of work done by each class. Calculation revealed that the prostitutes share vvas the largest. Working-class girls in Lydia prostitute themselves without exception to collect money for their dowries, and continue the practice until they marry. They choose their own husband. The circumference of the tomb is nearly threc-quarters of a mile. and ils breadth about three hundred yards.

 

Near il is a large lake, the lake of Gyges [the Gygaean Lake|, said by the Lydians to be never dry....

Hamilton vvas one of the first foreign travelers to explore the n Tepe area, whose appearance has changed little since his time, ough one no longer sees the ruined Türkmen villages that he

mentions. As he vvrites in his journal for 12 April 1836, referring

to King Alyattes as Halyattes