APPENDIX IV - LYDIA

Summary

Lydia is the link that binds together the geography and history of Asia and Europe. It occupied the western extremity of that great peninsula of Asia Minor, 750 miles in length and 400 in breadth, which runs out from the mountains of Armenia and divides the nations of the north from the happier inhabitants of a southern clime. The broad plains of the Hermos and Kayster, in which the Lydian monarchy grew up, are the richest in Asia Minor, and the mountain chains by which they are girdled, while sufficiently high to protect them, form cool and bracing sites for cities, and are rich in minerals of various kinds. The bays of Smyrna and Ephesos formed incomparable harbours; here the products of the inland could be safely shipped and carried past the bridge of islands which spans the Ægean to the nations of the West. Asia Minor, naturally the richest of countries and blessed with an almost infinite diversity of climates, finds, as it were, in the ancient territory of Lydia the summing-up of its manifold perfections and characteristics. Rightly, therefore, did the loamy plain of the Kayster give its name of Asian to the rest of the peninsula of which it formed the apex. This peninsula is cut in two by the Halys, which flows from that part of the Taurus range—the western spur of the Armenian mountains—which overlooks the eastern basin of the Mediterranean and forms the background of Kilikia.