Perge stood on the fertile Pamphylian plain, several miles inland from the Mediterranean coast. The name Parha appears in a thirteenth-century BCE Hittite treaty and is often connected with the later city, although the relationship between that Bronze Age place and the excavated settlement remains under study. Greek tradition attributed Perge’s foundation to heroes returning from the Trojan War. Archaeology instead reveals a long, layered occupation whose inhabitants combined Anatolian, Greek, and later Roman institutions. The acropolis above the lower city formed the earliest center of settlement.

Perge passed through Persian rule and entered the orbit of Alexander the Great in 334 BCE without a destructive siege. Under the Hellenistic kingdoms, the city expanded southward from the acropolis and received formidable walls and a monumental gate flanked by round towers. In 188 BCE it came under the kings of Pergamon, whose last ruler bequeathed his territories to Rome in 133 BCE. Perge subsequently became one of the leading cities of Roman Pamphylia and later an administrative center of the province.

The first three centuries CE brought Perge its greatest prosperity. Colonnaded streets crossed the city and channeled water from an elaborate nymphaeum. Baths, an agora, a stadium, and a large theater supported civic life, commerce, athletics, and entertainment. The sanctuary of Artemis Pergaia attracted regional devotion and appeared prominently on the city’s coinage. Local benefactors financed public works, among them Plancia Magna, a priestess and civic patron honored by numerous inscriptions near the Hellenistic gate. Her career demonstrates the visibility that wealthy women could attain within Roman provincial cities.

Perge also figured in early Christian history. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Barnabas passed through the city during their first missionary journey, traveling between the coast and the Anatolian interior. A Christian community later developed, and Perge became a bishopric. Churches were constructed as imperial religious life changed. From late antiquity onward, insecurity, shifting trade, and changes in the region’s waterways drew settlement toward more defensible ground. The lower city contracted, though the site remained known under Byzantine and subsequent rulers.

Systematic excavations began in 1946 under Istanbul University and have continued through Turkish archaeological institutions. They exposed the southern gate, streets, baths, stadium, theater, shops, fountains, and hundreds of inscriptions and sculptures. Much of what visitors see belongs to the Roman city, but its plan preserves Hellenistic defenses and evidence of earlier occupation. Perge is therefore valuable not as a monument to one period alone, but as a record of an Anatolian community repeatedly adapting to Greek kingdoms, Roman government, Christianity, and changing regional networks.