Kingdom of Lydia: The Rich Empire that Invented Money!

Kingdom of Lydia: The Rich Empire that Invented Money! The Legend of King Croesus Few individuals captured the imagination of ancient Greek writers and artists in quite the same way that Croesus, the last King of Lydia in western Anatolia, did. This ruler had been a powerful figure, presiding over a seemingly vastly wealthy kingdom that covered the western half of what is now Turkey in the sixth century BCE. He had funded the construction of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and minted the first gold coins that we have clear evidence of in history. 0:00 The Legend of King Croesus 2:47 Origins of the Lydians 4:13 King Gyges 5:55 Sardis 8:50 The First Currency 12:48 Miletus and the Pre-Socratics 16:46 King Croesus and the Temple of Artemis 19:42 Conquest Sources: __________________________________________________________________ Jack Martin Balcer, ‘Herodotus, the “Early State,” and Lydia’, in Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 43, H. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1994), pp. 246–249. Patricia Curd, ‘Presocratic Philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall, 2023). J. A. S. Evans, ‘What Happened to Croesus?’, in The Classical Journal, Vol. 74, No. 1 (October – November, 1978), pp. 34–40. Annick Payne and Jorit Wintjes, Lords of Asia Minor: An Introduction to the Lydians (Wiesbaden, 2016). Christopher Pelling, ‘Educating Croesus: Talking and Learning in Herodotus’ Lydian Logos’, in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April, 2006), pp. 141–177. Andrew Ramage and Paul Craddock, King Croesus’ Gold: Excavations at Sardis and the History of Gold Refining (London, 2000). Peter Thonemann, ‘Croesus and the Oracles’, in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 136 (2016), pp. 152–167. Peter Thonemann, ‘A New “Lydian History” from Sardis’in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 213 (2020), pp. 78–84.