It must have been in the hour of that disaster, or but little before,
that a Mermnad prince of Sardes, called Guggu by Assyrians and Gyges by
Greeks, threw off any allegiance he may have owed to Phrygia and began
to exalt his house and land of Lydia. He was the founder of a new
dynasty, having been by origin, apparently, a noble of the court who
came to be elevated to the throne by events differently related but
involving in all the accounts some intrigue with his predecessor's
queen. One historian, who says that he prevailed by the aid of Carians,
probably states a fact; for it was this same Gyges who a few years later
seems to have introduced Carian mercenaries to the notice of
Psammetichus of Egypt. Having met and repulsed the Cimmerian horde
without the aid of Ashurbanipal of Assyria, to whom he had applied in
vain, Gyges allied himself with the Egyptian rebel who had just founded
the Saite dynasty, and proceeded to enlarge his boundaries by attacking
the prosperous Greeks on his western hand. But he was successful only
against Colophon and Magnesia on the Maeander, inland places, and failed
before Smyrna and Miletus, which could be provisioned by their fleets
and probably had at their call a larger proportion of those warlike
"Ionian pirates" who had long been harrying the Levant. In the course of
a long reign, which Herodotus (an inexact chronologist) puts at
thirty-eight years, Gyges had time to establish his power and to secure
for his Lydians the control of the overland trade; and though a fresh
Cimmerian horde, driven on, says Herodotus, by Scythians (perhaps these
were not unconnected with the Medes then moving westward, as we know),
came down from the north, defeated and killed him, sacked the
unfortified part of his capital and swept on to plunder what it could of
the land as far as the sea without pausing to take fenced places, his
son Ardys, who had held out in the citadel of Sardes, and made his
submission to Ashurbanipal, was soon able to resume the offensive
against the Greeks. After an Assyrian attack on the Cimmerian flank or
rear had brought about the death of the chief barbarian leader in the
Cilician hills, and the dispersal of the storm, the Lydian marched down
the Maeander again. He captured Priene, but like his predecessor and his
successor, he failed to snatch the most coveted prize of the Greek
coast, the wealthy city Miletus at the Maeander mouth.
Up to the date of our present survey, however, and for half a century
yet to come, these conquests of the Lydian kings in Ionia and Caria
amounted to little more than forays for plunder and the levy of
blackmail, like the earlier Mesopotamian razzias. They might result in
the taking and sacking of a town here and there, but not in the holding
of it. The Carian Greek Herodotus, born not much more than a century
later, tells us expressly that up to the time of Croesus, that is, to
his own father's time, all the Greeks kept their freedom: and even if he
means by this statement, as possibly he does, that previously no Greeks
had been subjected to regular slavery, it still supports our point: for,
if we may judge by Assyrian practice, the enslaving of vanquished
peoples began only when their land was incorporated in a territorial
empire. We hear nothing of Lydian governors in the Greek coastal cities
and find no trace of a "Lydian period" in the strata of such Ionian and
Carian sites as have been excavated. So it would appear that the Lydians
and the Greeks lived up to and after 600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each
people holding its own on the whole and learning about the other in the
only international school known to primitive men, the school of war.
Herodotus represents that the Greek cities of Asia, according to the
popular belief of his time, were deeply indebted to Lydia for their
civilization. The larger part of this debt (if real) was incurred
probably after 600 B.C.; but some constituent items of the account must
have been of older date--the coining of money, for example. There is,
however, much to be set on the other side of the ledger, more than
Herodotus knew, and more than we can yet estimate. Too few monuments of
the arts of the earlier Lydians and too few objects of their daily use
have been found in their ill-explored land for us to say whether they
owed most to the West or to the East. From the American excavation of
Sardes, however, we have already learned for certain that their script
was of a Western type, nearer akin to the Ionian than even the Phrygian
was; and since their language contained a great number of Indo-European
words, the Lydians should not, on the whole, be reckoned an Eastern
people. Though the names given by Herodotus to their earliest kings are
Mesopotamian and may be reminiscent of some political connection with
the Far East at a remote epoch--perhaps that of the foreign relations of
Ur, which seem to have extended to Cappadocia--all the later royal and
other Lydian names recorded are distinctly Anatolian. At any rate all
connection with Mesopotamia must have long been forgotten before
Ashurbanipal's scribes could mention the prayer of "Guggu King of Luddi"
as coming from a people and a land of which their master and his
forbears had not so much as heard. As the excavation of Sardes and of
other sites in Lydia proceeds, we shall perhaps find that the higher
civilization of the country was a comparatively late growth, dating
mainly from the rise of the Mermnads, and that its products will show an
influence of the Hellenic cities which began not much earlier than 600
B.C., and was most potent in the century succeeding that date.
We know nothing of the extent of Lydian power towards the east, unless
the suggestions already based on the passage of Herodotus concerning the
meeting of Alyattes of Lydia with Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, some
years later than the date of our present survey, are well founded. If
they are, then Lydia's sphere of influence may be assumed to have
included Cilicia on the south-east, and its interests must have been
involved in Cappadocia on the north-east. It is not unlikely that the
Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held
before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive
Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot
of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times
only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally
remote and insignificant Tibareni.