Lords of Asia Minor: An Introduction to the Lydians.

• Author: Rung, Eduard V.
• Position: Book review

Lords of Asia Minor: An Introduction to the Lydians. By ANNICK PAYNE and JORIT WlNTJES. Philippika, vol. 93. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2016. Pp. x + 144, illus. [euro]29.80 (paper).

The Lydians stand at the threshold of Western historiography thanks to Herodotus's judgment (1.5) that the Persian Wars began with Croesus's reduction of Asiatic Greeks to tributary subjection. Nonetheless they have not always attracted the attention that their status as a pre-Persian regional power in Anatolia arguably warrants. Much of Radet 1893 has been superseded, but the enterprise in which he was engaged has not been matched in the modern era, notwithstanding Pedley's catalogue of literary sources (Pedley 1972), other volumes arising from the Sardis Expedition's activities, Roosevelt's Archaeology of Lydia (Roosevelt 2009) or works by Balcer (1984) and Dusinberre (2003, 2013) on Achaemenid Lydia and its antecedents. The glory days of the Lydian kingdom remain an elusive prequel to the arrival of Iranian power on the shores of the Aegean. This is the gap that Payne and Wintjes seek to fill.

Chapter one (pp. 5-45) introduces the written non-documentary sources (largely Greek literary texts), describes the geography of Lydia, and notes the mismatch between Herodotus's implicit chronology and the anchorage provided by Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts. On this last matter the authors are rightly not drawn into the complex discussion of the Chronographie tradition's treatment of Lydian dynastic dating. The description of Lydia's geography is useful (though the cartography is poor), but the idea raised earlier (pp. 5-6) of a problematic tension between Lydia as geopolitical entity and Lydia as the area where Lydian was spoken is not pursued here or elsewhere. Perhaps it is, after all, a non-problem, but, in framing it, the authors have not acknowledged recent approaches to ancient geography and ethnography (Skinner 2013, Almagor and Skinner 2013).

This section also sits awkwardly within a historical overview: the material would more naturally belong separately and earlier. The bulk of the chapter has six sections, dealing with prehistory (1.5), three royal dynasties--Atyad (1.6), Heraclid (1.7), Mermnad (1.8-1.9)--and post-Lydian Lydia (1.10). The last gallops through four centuries in under two pages (incidentally, the statement on p. 55 that Achaeus was the son of Antiochus III is startling), while the first concludes that the Lydians' relation to the...