Sardis Biennial Lecture with Professor Nicholas Cahill

6:30 pm – welcome
7:00 pm – lecture & discussion in Drawing Room
8:00 pm – cocktail reception in the Exhibition Room

We are greatly honoured and pleased to be able to welcome Professor Nicholas Cahill, Director of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis,  to London for the Biennial Lecture.  This year we are delighted to have the opportunity to hold the lecture for the third time at a venue so central to the history of gold and its measurement, particularly fitting for a talk on the capital of King Croesus.

Overview:
Located about 80km inland from Izmir and occupied from the 3rd millennium BC to late Byzantium, Sardis is one of the longest continuously settled urban environments in the Ancient, Classical, and Mediaeval worlds.

Over those three millennia, Sardis fell under the control of successive peoples and dynasties including the native Lydians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, and Byzantines, creating a diverse and dynamic population. Perhaps most famously, it was the capital of the Lydian Empire, the seat of King Croesus, and the place where coinage was first invented. The city was periodically rebuilt and reoccupied, with new structures reoccupying old sites, sometimes preserving the past, sometimes repurposing ancient building materials. In later times the city was one of the Seven Churches of Asia, and a center of Judaism housing the ancient world’s largest synagogue.

This rich backdrop makes Sardis a dream location for the archaeologist-detective interested in dissecting the inflections and continuities of its multiple overlain civilizations.
Since its inception in 1958, the expedition has included a multidisciplinary team studying diverse aspects of the site and its environs, from its art and architecture to the periodic earthquakes that levelled the city, to the microscopic seeds and other evidence for the diet of ancient Lydia, to new projects to protect and display the city’s history.

This Lecture will recap some of the recent exciting finds at Sardis, and how these finds are preserved and presented to the public.

Excavations at Sardis have been carried out by Harvard and Cornell Universities since 1958.  The Excavation is directed by Professor Cahill, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.