Croesus ( ; Lydian: ; Phrygian: ; ; Latin: ; reigned: c. 585 – c. 546 BC) was the king of Lydia, who reigned from 585 BC until his defeat by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 547 or 546 BC. According to Herodotus, he reigned 14 years. Croesus was renowned for his wealth; Herodotus and Pausanias noted that his gifts were preserved at Delphi. The fall of Croesus had a profound effect on the Greeks, providing a fixed point in their calendar. "By the fifth century at least", J. A. S. Evans has remarked, "Croesus had become a figure of myth, who stood outside the conventional restraints of chronology." Name The name of Croesus was not attested in contemporary inscriptions in the Lydian language. In 2019, D. Sasseville and K. Euler published a research of Lydian coins apparently minted during his rule, where the name of the ruler was rendered as Qλdãns. The name comes from the Latin transliteration of the Greek , which was itself the ancient Hellenic adaptation of the Lydian name . is a compound term consisting of the proper name , of a glide () and of the Lydian term , meaning "master, lord, noble". According to J. M. Kearns, Croesus's real personal name would have been , while would have been a honorific name meaning "The noble Karoś". Life and reign Croesus was born in 620 BC to the king Alyattes of Lydia and one of his queens, a Carian noblewoman whose name is still unknown. Croesus had at least one full sister, Aryenis, as well as a step-brother named Pantaleon, born from a Ionian Greek wife of Alyattes. Under his father's reign, Croesus had been a governor of Adramyttium, which Alyattes had rebuilt as a centre of operations for military actions against the Cimmerians, a nomadic people from the Pontic steppe who had invaded Western Asia, and attacked Lydia over the course of several invasions during which they killed Alyattes's great-grandfather Gyges, and possibly his grandfather Ardys and his father Sadyattes. As governor of Adramyttium, Croesus had to provide his father with Ionian Greek mercenaries for a military campaign in Caria. During Croesus's tenure as governor of Adramyttium itself, a rivalry had developed between him and his step-brother Pantaleon, who might have been intended by Alyattes to be his successor. Following Alyattes's death in 585 BC, this rivalry became an open succession