THE GLEAMING ACROPOLIS of the ancient city of Pergamon rises high atop a promontory that looks out over Turkey’s Bakırçay Plain. With Pergamon as their capital, the Greek monarchs of the Attalid Dynasty (283–133 b.c.) came to rule much of western Anatolia. The Attalids sculpted this hilltop city into an urban gem, sponsoring construction of a theater, a multistory stoa—or porticoed public building—and a gymnasium, all built on terraces lining the steep slope. According to legend, parchment was invented to be used in Pergamon’s library, which rivaled the one in Alexandria in Egypt. Roman scholars studied manuscripts from the library, and Roman artists copied Pergamene statues. Around the middle of the second century B.C., Attalid sculptors carved a depiction of the Gigantomachy, a mythic battle pitting order against chaos, on a frieze more than 100 yards long that encircled the city’s Great Altar of Zeus. Yet within a generation of the altar’s construction, the kingdom disappeared. “The Attalids are like a flash empire,” says historian Noah Kaye of Michigan State University. “It’s fascinating for the moment that it represents.”
Known as the Medici of antiquity for their financial acumen and generous patronage of the arts, the Attalids rose to power in such a short amount of time and left such a lasting cultural legacy that their reign has long intrigued scholars. The dynasty ruled both Greeks living in the western coastal areas of their realm and people living in inner Anatolia, such as the Phrygians, with a light hand, maintaining a decentralized form of government that was distinct from other kingdoms of the era. Instead of establishing garrisons and imposing
