A kingdom made from a fortress
Pergamon stands on a steep hill overlooking the Caicus valley in western Anatolia, a few kilometres inland from the Aegean. It was a minor settlement until the early Hellenistic period. After the death of Alexander the Great, its fortress was used to store treasure by Lysimachos, one of Alexander’s successors. His officer Philetairos took control of it and the treasure around 282 BCE and gradually turned it into a small independent state.
Philetairos ruled without the title of king, but his family, the Attalids, did take that title later. The best-known rulers are Attalos I, who defeated invading Galatians in the 230s BCE and took the royal title, and Eumenes II, who reigned from 197 to 159 BCE and oversaw the greatest building programme. The last king, Attalos III, died in 133 BCE and left his kingdom to Rome in his will. The circumstances are debated, but the result was the Roman province of Asia, a change that created the Roman Asia province.
Why kings collected books
The Attalids were wealthy but lacked the ancient prestige of Macedon or the Ptolemies. Like other Hellenistic dynasties, they sought legitimacy through culture. They sponsored artists and philosophers, bought statues, and built a library. Collecting books was a way of presenting Pergamon as a true Greek capital, equal to Alexandria and Antioch.
The library stood on the acropolis next to the sanctuary of Athena, in a row of rooms attached to the porticoes of her precinct. Excavators identified the rooms, which had raised floors and wall benches that may have supported cupboards, though the exact layout of the shelving is debated. A large statue of Athena is thought to have stood in the main hall, based on a surviving statue base and related finds.
How big was it?
Ancient writers put the collection at about 200,000 scrolls, and Plutarch says Mark Antony later gave these to Cleopatra as a gift. Modern scholars are cautious about this. Ancient numbers are often rhetorical, and the story of the gift reads like political gossip from Antony’s enemies. The truth may be that the library was substantial but much smaller than the figure, and that part of its holdings may have been moved or lost over time. What is secure is that Pergamon had a noted library and a scholarly circle, which included a grammarian named Crates of Mallos, who worked there in the second century BCE.
The rivalry with Egypt is part of the story. The Ptolemies ran a famous collection, and the traditions of the papyrus scroll collection at Alexandria and the later accounts of the Ptolemaic Alexandria library show how seriously the dynasty competed. Pergamon had to find its own way of keeping up. Whether the two kingdoms really fought over scholars and rare copies is described in ancient anecdotes, some of which may be exaggerated.
The parchment story
A well-known tradition says that Pergamon gave its name to parchment. The Latin word is pergamenum, and the Greek is pergamene, both of which resemble the city’s name. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, drawing on an earlier author, says that a Ptolemy banned the export of papyrus from Egypt out of jealousy of the Pergamene library, and that parchment was invented at Pergamon as a result.
Most scholars treat this account as plausible in part but unproven. Animal skins had been used for writing in the Near East long before the Attalids, so Pergamon cannot have invented the material. It may have refined or promoted the preparation of skins as a reliable alternative, and the name could reflect the city’s reputation for producing good writing skins. Whether an export ban took place is uncertain. The safe summary is that the word derives from the city, but the reason is not fully settled.
Parchment mattered because it was more durable than papyrus and could be folded into codices, the book form that later became standard. That change belongs mostly to late antiquity.
Scholarship and science
Pergamon was a centre for medicine as well as literature. The physician Galen was born there in 129 CE, long after the Attalids, and trained in the sanctuary of Asklepios in the lower city; his career is covered in the article on Galen anatomy. The city also supported sculpture, and the monuments of the Attalids, including the famous altar, are discussed in a separate piece.
What remains
The library rooms can still be seen on the acropolis, though almost nothing of the books survives. This is typical of ancient libraries, whose collections of papyrus and parchment rarely outlived their buildings. Records of what the library held come from scattered references in later authors. Pergamon was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014, and the German Archaeological Institute has worked there since the late nineteenth century.
Pergamon’s significance lies less in its size than in the way a small dynasty used books, art and learning to claim a place among the great Greek states.