Pergamon rose on a steep hill above the Bakırçay plain in western Anatolia. An earlier settlement existed, but the city became a major power after Philetairos established control in the early third century BCE. His Attalid successors turned Pergamon into the capital of a Hellenistic kingdom. Terraces climbed the acropolis, using topography to display royal authority. Palaces, sanctuaries, arsenals, a theater, stoas, and civic spaces formed a dramatic ensemble visible across a landscape marked by roads, shrines, and elite burial mounds.

Attalid rulers allied with Rome and sponsored art, scholarship, and monumental building. The great altar associated with Zeus, the sanctuary of Athena, the library, and the exceptionally steep theater made the upper city famous. Sculptors developed an influential style emphasizing movement, emotion, and victory. Below the acropolis, the sanctuary of Asklepios became a celebrated healing center where ritual, water, exercise, diet, and medical practice converged. Galen, one of antiquity’s most influential physicians, was born and trained in Pergamon during the Roman period.

The last Attalid king, Attalos III, bequeathed his realm to Rome in 133 BCE. Pergamon flourished as a city of the Roman province of Asia, expanding onto lower ground. Roman patrons built or enlarged the Asclepion, aqueducts, baths, an amphitheater, the Trajan temple, and the enormous Serapeum known as the Red Hall. Christianity later transformed the religious landscape, and Pergamon was named among the Seven Churches of Asia. The Red Hall itself acquired Christian, Jewish, and later Islamic uses.

As political and commercial routes shifted toward Constantinople, Byzantine Pergamon contracted but did not disappear. Turkish and Ottoman settlement added mosques, baths, markets, bridges, inns, houses, and waterworks around and over older remains. Modern archaeology began with nineteenth-century excavations, during which the Pergamon Altar’s surviving sculptures were taken to Berlin under agreements made with Ottoman authorities. Excavation exposed the acropolis but also separated objects from their architectural setting and shaped a modern emphasis on the Hellenistic city.

UNESCO inscribed Pergamon and its multilayered cultural landscape in 2014. The property includes the acropolis, Asklepion, Red Hall, tumuli, sanctuaries, and parts of the later town. Its importance comes from continuities and transformations across Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Jewish, and Ottoman histories, not from one golden age alone. Reconstructed columns, cleared terraces, missing sculptures, modern Bergama, and surviving sacred uses all influence present interpretation. The landscape remains the key historical artifact, joining monumental hill, plain, water systems, burial mounds, and inhabited city.