Who ruled Pergamon?

Pergamon, or Pergamum, was a Greek city in north-western Asia Minor, built on a steep 335-metre hill above the Caicus valley, beside the modern town of Bergama in Turkey. From 281 to 133 BC it was the capital of the Attalid kings, who made it one of the leading cultural centres of the Hellenistic world, famous for its library and its great altar. It flourished again under Rome, then shrank to a fortress in the Byzantine centuries. Its ruins have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014.

Pottery fragments show that the hill was settled by the late eighth century BC, though little survives of the early town because later builders levelled the slopes into broad terraces. The city first appears in writing in Xenophon's account of the march of the Ten Thousand, which ended there in 400 or 399 BC. At that time it was held by the family of Gongylos of Eretria, a Greek who had been granted the territory by Xerxes I, and it remained within the Persian Achaemenid Empire until the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Lysimachus, king of Thrace, took Pergamon in 301 BC, and his lieutenant Philetaerus enlarged the town. When Lysimachus' kingdom collapsed in 281 BC, Philetaerus made himself independent and founded the Attalid dynasty, which ruled until 133 BC. His successor Eumenes I extended the territory after defeating the Seleucid Empire near Sardis in 261 BC, and Attalus I, after a victory over the Galatians around 238 BC, took the title of king.

The Attalids were among Rome's most dependable allies. They sided with Rome against Macedon and against Antiochus III, and when the Peace of Apamea was concluded in 188 BC they received almost all the former Seleucid lands in Asia Minor, bringing the kingdom to its largest extent. The brothers Eumenes II and Attalus II, ruling one after the other, rebuilt the capital on a grand scale. A new wall about four kilometres long enclosed roughly 90 hectares, the acropolis was remodelled with Athens as its model, and the Great Altar, decorated with a 113-metre frieze of gods battling giants, was raised on a terrace. The library was said to be second only to Alexandria's. Parchment takes its name from the city, although the story that the Pergamenes invented it is untrue.

When Attalus III died with no heir in 133 BC, he bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. A claimant named Aristonicus rose in revolt and defeated a Roman consular army before being crushed in 129 BC; most of the kingdom then became the province of Asia, with Pergamon briefly its capital before the role passed to Ephesus. Pergamon served as the headquarters of Mithridates VI of Pontus in his first war against Rome, and after his defeat the Romans stripped it of its privileges.

The city recovered under the empire. Augustus granted it the first temple of the imperial cult in the province, and under Trajan and Hadrian a new Roman city with massive temples, a stadium, a theatre, a forum and an amphitheatre rose at the foot of the acropolis. The healing sanctuary of Asclepius became one of the most famous in the Roman world, and the physician Galen was born and trained there. Some estimates put the population at about 200,000 in the mid-second century. An earthquake in 262 and a Gothic sack soon afterwards ended this prosperity.

Arab raiders first captured Pergamon in 663 or 664, and the Byzantine emperor Constans II walled the reduced settlement on the acropolis with reused stone; it was sacked again in 716. After the Battle of Manzikert, Seljuk attacks in 1109 and 1113 left it largely in ruins until Manuel I Komnenos rebuilt it around 1170. After 1204 it belonged to the Empire of Nicaea. Shortly after 1300 it fell to the Turkish emirate of Karasi and then passed to the Ottoman Empire, while the Christian see declined and disappeared from records by the fifteenth century.

The German engineer Carl Humann recognised fragments of the altar frieze in the 1870s and excavated the altar between 1878 and 1886. With Ottoman approval its reliefs went to Berlin, where the Pergamon Museum opened in 1907 to house them. German excavations led by Alexander Conze, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, Theodor Wiegand and their successors have continued, with wartime breaks, to the present day.