The Dead Church
The Destination
To a striking degree, the history of the church at Sardis paralleled that of the city. Founded about 1200 B.C., Sardis had been one of the greatest cities in the ancient world, capital of the fabulously wealthy Lydian kingdom. (The name of that kingdom’s most famous king, Croesus, lives on in the saying “As rich as Croesus.”) Aesop, the famous writer of fables, may have been from Sardis. Much of Sardis’s wealth came from gold taken from the nearby Pactolus River; archaeologists have found hundreds of crucibles, used for refining gold, in the ruins of Sardis (Edwin M. Yamauchi, New Testament Cities in Western Asia Minor [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980], 65). Gold and silver coins were apparently first minted at Sardis. The city also benefited from its location at the western end of the royal road that led east to the Persian capital city of Susa, and from its proximity to other important trade routes. It was also a center for wool production and the garment industry; in fact, Sardis claimed to have discovered how to dye wool.
Sardis was located about thirty miles south of Thyatira in the fertile valley of the Hermus River. A series of spurs or hills jutted out from the ridge of Mount Tmolus, south of the Hermus River. On one of those hills, some fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor, stood Sardis. Its location made the city all but impregnable. The hill on which Sardis was built had smooth, nearly perpendicular rock walls on three sides. Only from the south could the city be approached, via a steep, difficult path. The one drawback to an otherwise ideal site was that there was limited room for the city to expand. Eventually, as Sardis grew, a new city sprang up at the foot of the hill. The old site remained a refuge to retreat into when danger threatened.
Its seemingly impregnable location caused the inhabitants of Sardis to become overconfident. That complacency eventually led to the city’s downfall. Through carelessness, the unimaginable happened: Sardis was conquered. The news of its downfall sent shock waves through the Greek world. Even in John’s day, several centuries later, a proverbial saying equated “to capture the acropolis of Sardis” with “to do the impossible” (Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting [Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986], 133). Dr. Robert L. Thomas relates the account of Sardis’s fall:
Despite an alleged warning against self-satisfaction by the Greek god whom he consulted, Croesus the king of Lydia initiated an attack against Cyrus king of Persia, but was soundly defeated. Returning to Sardis to recoup and rebuild his army for another attack, he was pursued quickly by Cyrus who laid siege against Sardis. Croesus felt utterly secure in his impregnable situation atop the acropolis and foresaw an easy victory over the Persians who were cornered among the perpendicular rocks in the lower city, an easy prey for the assembling Lydian army to crush. After retiring one evening while the drama was unfolding, he awakened to discover that the Persians had gained control of the acropolis by scaling one-by-one the steep walls (549 B.C.). So secure did the Sardians feel that they left this means of access completely unguarded, permitting the climbers to ascend unobserved. It is said that even a child could have defended the city from this kind of attack, but not so much as one observer had been appointed to watch the side that was believed to be inaccessible.
History repeated itself more than three and a half centuries later when Antiochus the Great conquered Sardis by utilizing the services of a sure-footed mountain climber from Crete (195 B.C.). His army entered the city by another route while the defenders in careless confidence were content to guard the one known approach, the isthmus of land connected to Mount Tmolus on the south. (
