It is perhaps timely, in the light of the discoveries made in 2003, to reassess the historical background to Kerkenes. The melding of archaeological evidence with historical reconstructions is ever full of pitfalls, and the more so in the present situation in which the primary historical source is Herodotus. While it is true that there is no certain proof, there is no good reason to doubt that Kerkenes should indeed be identified with Pteria. If this identification is accepted the complete destruction would have been carried out by the hand of Croesus, King of Lydia, in association with what modern scholars have termed the "Battle of Pteria" in which, as recounted by Herodotus, neither Croesus nor Cyrus the Great gained victory. The date of the destruction at Kerkenes cannot, on the stylistic evidence of the ivory plaque recovered in 1996 as well as other excavated objects, be much earlier than the date for the fall of the Lydian capital of Sardis which is traditionally put at 547 BC. A greater difficulty is the date of the foundation of Kerkenes and the identification of the founding power.

Earlier interpretations have to be revised or altogether abandoned in the light of the new textual and archaeological evidence. It is perhaps helpful, nevertheless, to review the earlier ideas and to examine once again some aspects that led to their formation. In this respect it is perhaps salutary to note that excavation has demonstrated the extent of the shortcomings in interpretation that was almost exclusively dependent on the observation of features visible on the ground together with the preliminary results of the Remote Sensing Survey. The inability to understand correctly the observations and survey data, which perhaps - with hindsight - owed more than a little to preconceptions concerning the employment of mud-brick on stone for Iron Age city defences in the Ancient Near East, and within Anatolia in particular, demonstrates the essential need to corroborate such interpretations by means of extensive excavation. Examination of the evidence derived from a combination of survey methods led to the conclusion that the life of the city was of somewhat shorter duration than now seems probable. This interpretation was based on two ideas: firstly that the entire 7km of visible stone defences were merely the base for a mud-brick wall that had never been built and, secondly the interior appearance of the city itself which was likewise, it seemed, unfinished. It thus appeared reasonable that the city on Kerkenes was founded no more than 50 years before its destruction. If, as still appears highly probable, Kerkenes is Pteria, it would have been under the sway of the Median Empire by the time of the treaty between the Medes and the Lydians that followed the "Battle of the Eclipse" of 585 BC. But, if Pteria really had such a short life it seemed reasonable to conclude that it was a Median foundation which would have been established sometime after the fall of Assyria in 612 BC. This preliminary interpretation was thought to be reinforced by the fortuitous discovery in the 1996 test excavations of a columned hall of possibly Iranian type. Later survey and larger scale excavations, conducted since 2000, have increasingly pointed towards the Anatolian character of the city, but because the excavated evidence did not immediately suggest a longer life for the city these results were seen as reflecting the 'Anatolianisation' of a foreign, namely Median, city. In the course of the latest, 2003, season it became clear that the successive phases of monumental architecture at the monumental entrance to the 'Palace Complex' could hardly be squashed into fifty or less years. That the 2003 excavations have moved interpretation forward to a point where recognition of Median influence on a mighty Anatolian city has become a major focus of future research design demonstrates the inestimable value of the new program of excavations at Kerkenes which will flesh out the skeleton of the city plan that has been obtained through a combination of Remote Sensing techniques.