Seven churches

THE SEVEN CHURCHES
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Smyrna was a small city about 35 miles north of Ephesus. It was a city built by the hill
Pagus with the most safest of all harbors in Asia. In AD 178 it was destroyed by an
earthquake and was built again by the best town planners of that time. It was a planned
city It was originally peopled by the Asiatics known as the Lelages. The city
seems to have been taken from the Lelages by the Aeolian Greeks about 1100
BC; there still remain traces of the cyclopean masonry of that early time. In 688
BC it passed into the possession of the Ionian Greeks and was made one of the
cities of the Ionian confederacy, but in 627 BC it was taken by the Lydians. During
the years 301 to 281 BC, Lysimachus entirely rebuilt it on a new site and
surrounded it by a wall. Its modern name is Izmir. But at John’s period, the city was
called
It was famous for its schools of science and medicine, and for its architecture. It
was a rich city and was the center of culture and learning. It was the home of Homer of
Iliad , the world’s earliest classical poets of the Greek literature.
Homer
On the slope of Mt. Pagus was a theater which seated 20,000 spectators. In the
23 AD year a temple was built in honor of Tiberius and his mother Julia, with the
Golden Street connecting the temples of Zeus and Cybele.
The Great Mother goddess, Cybele, whose temple was located on the eastern side of the
city, was Smyrna’s patron deity. Often pictured on Smyrna’s coins, she was regarded as