Lydia

The Greek name of the western Anatolian kingdom, Lydía, ruled from Sardis by the Mermnad dynasty whose last king, Croesus, lost it to Cyrus in 547 BCE. Herodotus devotes the opening of his history to the Lydians: their kings from Gyges onward, their invention of retail trade and of coined money, and the fall of Croesus that brought Greek Asia under Persia. To the Greeks the Lydians were the wealthy, half-oriental neighbors just inland of the Ionian coast.

Homer, knowing the same country at the Bronze-Age remove of epic, does not call it Lydia but names its people the Mēíones, the Maeonians, and that older name survived as a poetic alternative. Lydía is the form that prevailed and passed through Latin to the modern world, the western name of a kingdom that the Assyrians knew as Luddu and the Persians annexed as Sparda. The land of the first coinage is, fittingly, the land that the most naming traditions in Anatolia competed to label.

The Hebrew name Lud, a son of Shem in the table of nations (Genesis 10:22) and, in Isaiah and Ezekiel, a distant nation of bowmen and mercenaries. It is commonly identified with Lydia, the Assyrian Luddu, an identification that goes back at least to Josephus and that the placement of Lud among the Semitic peoples of Asia Minor supports. The entry is marked disputed because the Hebrew Bible also knows a Ludim descended from Egypt (Genesis 10:13), an African people, and the two are easily and often confused.

The dispute is precisely an onomastic one: a single short name, Lud, attached in the table of nations to two different lineages, one Semitic and Anatolian, one Hamitic and African. The Shemite Lud aligns in form and position with the Assyrian Luddu and the Greek Lydía, and most readers take it for Lydia; the Egyptian Ludim is a separate people whose identity is genuinely unknown. The name shows how a bare consonantal form, without a fixed referent, can split across the map, the same three letters naming a kingdom in Anatolia and a nation somewhere south of Egypt.

The Assyrian name of Lydia, Luddu, attested in the annals of Ashurbanipal, who records that Gugu, king of Luddu, a land of which the Assyrians had never before heard, sent envoys after the god Ashur revealed Assyria’s greatness to him in a dream. This Gugu is Gyges, founder of the Mermnad dynasty, and the episode is the first contact between Lydia and the Mesopotamian world to be recorded from the eastern side.

Luddu is the easternmost of Lydia’s names, the kingdom as it first swam into Assyrian view, a distant western power suddenly seeking an alliance against the Cimmerians. The same form lies behind the Hebrew Lud. It is a small marvel of synchronism: the Gyges whom Herodotus made the subject of a famous tale of usurpation appears here in his own lifetime, under his own name, in the cuneiform of a king a thousand miles to the east, as Gugu šar Luddi.

A name that appears exactly once in the Hebrew Bible, Sĕpārad, in Obadiah’s vision of the return: “the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sĕpārad shall possess the cities of the Negev.” Where Sĕpārad lay is the dispute the entry’s label records, but the identification most scholars now accept is Sardis, the Lydian capital: the Aramaic face of the Lydian-Aramaic bilingual found at Sardis itself calls the city sprd, the same consonants, matching the Sfard of Lydian coins and the Sparda by which the Persian empire knew its Lydian satrapy. On that reading, Obadiah’s verse is a glimpse of a Judean exile community in Asia Minor within a generation or two of the fall of Jerusalem.

The name’s later history is larger than its verse. Medieval Jewish tradition, reading Obadiah without a map of Achaemenid Anatolia, identified Sĕpārad with the far west, with Spain, and the identification stuck: the Jews of Iberia became the Sephardim, and their whole civilization, liturgy, and language took its name from this word. The result is one of the strangest journeys on any page of this atlas: a Lydian city’s name, filtered through one prophetic verse, migrated three thousand kilometers west and became the permanent name of a diaspora that had never seen Sardis. Lydia’s page holds the name’s true address; Jewish history kept the misdelivered letter.

The Old Persian name of Lydia as an Achaemenid satrapy, Sparda, listed among the lands Darius rules in the great inscriptions at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rustam. The name is that of Sardis, the Lydian capital and the satrapy’s administrative seat and the western terminus of the Royal Road; in the trilingual inscriptions the Elamite and Babylonian versions render the same form. After Cyrus took the kingdom in 547 BCE, Sparda became the Persian word for the whole region.

Sparda is the imperial name, the kingdom converted into a province and labeled from its capital rather than its people. It sits beside the Greek Lydía, the Assyrian Luddu, and the Hebrew Lud as the fourth of Lydia’s names, the one belonging to the empire that ended its independence. The land of Croesus passed, in a generation, from a kingdom the Greeks named for its people to a satrapy the Persians named for its fallen capital.

The Latin name of the region, Lydia, taken from the Greek; under Rome it was a district of the province of Asia, its old royal capital Sardis still a major city. The Romans inherited the Greek tradition of Lydian wealth and luxury, and the Etruscans’ own claim, reported by Herodotus and repeated by Roman writers, to have migrated from Lydia gave the name a further resonance in Italy.

The Latin carries the Greek form into the European languages as the standard name of the kingdom. By the imperial period the political reality was centuries gone, and Lydia survived as a geographical label and a literary memory of Croesus and his gold. The kingdom that gave the world coined money is known to that world by its Greek-and-Latin name, while its own Anatolian language and whatever it called itself left only scraps in the Lydian inscriptions of Sardis.