Bin Tepe, The Tumulus of Alyattes, and Karnıyarık Tepe

The tumulus tombs of Bin Tepe, the cemetery north of Sardis, are the most conspicuous ancient landmarks of Lydia, visible from afar and marking the region as a place of peculiar magic (figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Bin Tepe is the largest tumulus cemetery in Turkey, perhaps in the world; much larger than the Giza plateau in Egypt. Today about 115 tumuli survive in Bin Tepe; in the 1940s, there were at least 149, but many have been destroyed by agriculture. It is a landscape of extraordinary, haunting beauty (figs. 6, 7, 8).

According to Herodotus:

The land of Lydia has no great store of wonderful marvels, compared with other lands, except for the gold-dust which is carried down from Tmolos; There is one monument to be seen there which is larger than any other except only those in Egypt and Babylon: for there is the tomb of Alyattes, the father of Croesus, of which the base (crepis) is made of great stones and the rest of it of mounded earth. It was built by the tradesmen and artisans and prostitutes. And there remained until my time five boundary stones on top of the tomb, and on these were inscribed how much each had contributed; and calculation showed that the prostitutes’ share of the work was the greatest… The tomb has a circumference of six furlongs and two hundred feet, and the width is thirteen hundred feet. And there is a great lake next to the tomb, which, say the Lydians, is fed by ever-flowing springs; it is called the Gygaean Lake. Such then is this tomb. (Hdt. 1.93)

The tumulus of Alyattes is among the largest tumuli in the world, about 355 m in diameter and 63 m high, very close to Herodotus’ figures (fig. 9). Teoman Yalçınkaya calculated that it contains more than 785,000 m³ of earth and stone, and that it could have been built in two and a half years with a labor force of about 2,400 men and 600 draft animals. Its crepis wall “of great stones” no longer survives, but like most Lydian tumuli, it has a chamber built from exquisitely carved blocks, with solid limestone roof beams weighing more than 16 tons (Figs. 10, 11, 12). Again, like most Lydian tombs, the chamber is located well away from the center of the mound, to make it more difficult for looters to discover. The chamber was discovered, already plundered in antiquity, by the 19th century Prussian consul Ludwig Peter Spiegelthal.

The Tumulus of Alyattes is one of three enormous tumuli that crown the ridge of Bin Tepe, dwarfing all the other mounds. The middle mound of these three giants is Karnıyarık Tepe (Fig. 13). With a diameter of 230 m and a height of 53 m on the south, its footprint is as large as the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. Because the tomb of Alyattes had already been opened in antiquity, the Sardis expedition in 1962 chose to explore Karnıyarık Tepe as part of its archaeological research. After geophysical prospection and coring in 1962 and 1963, the interior of the mound was explored with tunnels in 1964, 1965, and 1966. Further geophysical prospection was done in 1992, followed by a program of coring in 1995. Another round of geophysical prospection was undertaken in 2011, and tunneling was resumed in 2012, in a joint project with the Manisa Museum.

A unique feature of Karnıyarık Tepe is the crepis wall within the mound (figs. 14, 15). Crepis walls usually surround the outside of a tumulus, retaining the earth fill and providing a crisp edge. This wall, however, is buried well within the mound and was never finished. This crepis wall apparently belonged to an earlier, smaller tumulus, about 85 m in diameter. It seems that at an early stage of construction, the builders decided to expand the mound, almost tripling its diameter, and abandoned and buried the unfinished crepis wall. Why did this happen? Was the site of a smaller mound commandeered by a more powerful patron? Did the owner come into a great fortune, and so was able to afford a greater burial monument? We do not know. The larger mound probably had its own crepis wall, but hardly a trace survives.

The crepis wall consists of two courses of finely worked limestone blocks, and a rounded “bolster course” (figs. 16, 17, 18). When work was abandoned, two gaps remained in the wall, and a number of blocks were missing from the upper course. One gap was left in front of a large outcropping of bedrock; part of this outcrop was carved to resemble blocks, so it could be incorporated in the wall itself. The other gap is odd, since the sections of wall end flat, like door jambs, as if the builders did not intend to fill the intervening space. However, in this space bedrock rises well above the top of the wall, so this could not have served as an entrance into the tomb.

Many stones bear inscribed signs, which probably identify the crews of masons responsible for different sections of wall. Among the signs are a symbol which Hanfmann read (probably incorrectly) as “Gugu” (fig. 19), pairs of swastikas (Fig. 20), and letters including Α and Θ. These masons’ marks and other details of construction allow us to determine how the Lydians organized the labor force to build this wall. At least seven separate teams of masons worked on the wall, each responsible for a different section or course, and sometimes (but not always) marking off their work with signs.

Between 1964 and 1966 about one-third of the crepis wall was uncovered; it presumably continues all the way around the mound.

The Sardis Expedition was not the first group to discover this Lydian crepis wall. In 1964 we uncovered a network of earlier, Roman tunnels. The Roman tunnels are smaller than the modern ones - 70 cm wide and 1.8 m high, only wide enough for one person (fig. 21). About 130 m of ancient tunnels have been followed, and further unexplored tunnels continue into the mound. Most or all of the tunnels were deliberately backfilled, perhaps to dispose of backdirt from later tunnels. At one spot along the crepis wall, the Roman explorers found a gap in the lowest course, and therefore removed a block from the top of the wall and started a tunnel behind the wall (fig. 22). This was quickly abandoned when it proved to be just tumulus fill. They dug a second such short, exploratory tunnel further on, where two teams of workmen met but did not install the final block between their sections. In a third spot, the Romans dug behind the crepis wall for 7 m, and then removed a block from the upper course in order to cross over to the front of the wall, where the tunnel continues (fig. 23). Such ancient robbers runnels are found in the tumulus of Alyattes and most other tumuli in Bin Tepe.

We presume that if the Roman tunnels were backfilled, that they did not lead to a chamber, since the backfilling presumably resulted from continued exploring in other tunnels. Nor did the great gash in the mound (the “Karnıyarık”) dig deep enough to reach the original ground level. The Roman and our own tunnels penetrated to the center of the mound, and then explored the area around the center in an attempt to locate the burial chamber. These tunnels have revealed important information about the construction of the mound. But over half a kilometer of tunneling within the mound has not yet uncovered a chamber.

We do not know who was buried in this mound. Its tremendous size suggests that it belongs to a member of the Lydian royal family. Archaeologists once believed that it belonged to Gyges, the first king of the Mermnad dynasty, based in part on a passage of the contemporary poet Hipponax:

†τέαρε[.....]δεύειε† τὴν ἐπὶ Σμύρνης ἰθὶ διὰ Λυδῶν παρὰ τὸν Ἀττάλεω τύμβον καὶ σῆμα Γύγεω καὶ †μεγάστρυ† στήλην καὶ μνῆμα Τωτος Μυτάλιδι πάλμυδος, πρὸς ἥλιον δύνοντα γαστέρα τρέψας.

[...] towards Smyrna go through [the land of] the Lydians, by the tomb of Attales and the monument of Gyges and the stele of [...] and the memorial of Tos, sultan of Mytalis,
having turned your belly towards the setting sun….

In this interpretation, Attales is a mistake for Alyattes; the monument of Gyges is Karnıyarık Tepe, and the memorial of Tos is the third huge mound in Bin Tepe, Kır Mutaf Tepe to the west of Karnıyarık Tepe. However, pottery from the tumulus fill suggests that the larger mound does not date earlier than about 600 BC. Since Gyges died in about 644 BC, it cannot be his tomb. Between about 600 BC, the earliest possible date for the tumulus, and 547 BC, when the Lydians were overthrown by the Persians and therefore presumably not building royal tumuli, there were only two kings: Alyattes and Croesus. Alyattes’ tomb is almost certainly Koca Mutaf Tepe, the largest tumulus in Bin Tepe; and Croesus was taken by the Persians and became a trusted advisor to Cyrus; he was probably not buried in a royal tumulus. If not a king, could this tomb be for a queen?

von Olfers, “Über die Lydischen Königsgräber bei Sardes und den Grabhügel des Alyattes”; McLauchlin, Lydian Graves and Burial Customs; Ratté, “Not the Tomb of Gyges”; Roosevelt, Lydian and Persian Period Settlement in Lydia; Roosevelt, The Archaeology of Lydia, from Gyges to Alexander; Roosevelt, “Symbolic Door Stelae and Graveside Monuments in Western Anatolia”; Ratté, Lydian Architecture; Baughan, Couched in Death: Klinai and Identity in Anatolia and Beyond.