Question
Where was Thyatira, Lydia's home town?
Thyatira lay in the valley of the Lycus, a tributary of the Hermus, in the region of Lydia in western Asia Minor; the modern town of Akhisar in Turkey stands on the site, and the map point stands there. It was about 61 km from Pergamum and 51 km from Sardis in a straight line, on the road between them; Ephesus was 117 km to the south-west.
Lydia met Paul far from home, at Philippi in Macedonia, some 380 km across the Aegean: “And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened.” Her trade fits the city: inscriptions from Thyatira name more guilds than any other city of the province, among them the dyers, and one of the cloths dyed there was a red made from madder root rather than the sea-snail purple of Tyre. Thyatira was also one of the seven churches of Revelation, warned about “that woman Jezebel”; its church, Christ says, had works, love, service and faith.
Strabo calls Thyatira a settlement of Macedonians, planted by the Seleucid kings early in the third century BC to guard the road; it had no acropolis and changed hands between the Seleucids and Pergamum before Rome took it with the rest of Attalus' kingdom in 133 BC. Little of the ancient city is visible under modern Akhisar beyond a stretch of colonnaded street and a basilica cleared in the town centre, so Lydia's city is known mostly from its inscriptions and coins.
Scripture: Acts 16:14–15; Acts 16:40; Rev 1:11; Rev 2:18–20
Sources
- Straight-line distances between the places' points: OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding Data (CC BY 4.0)
- Strabo, Geography 13.4.4 (Thyatira a settlement of Macedonians)
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 5.115 (Thyatira on the Lycus)
- Tituli Asiae Minoris V.2: Regio septentrionalis ad orientem vergens, ed. P. Herrmann (1989), the inscriptions of Thyatira and its guilds
- C. J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting (1986)
- W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (1904)
Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.