The Attalids of Pergamon and Anatolia : Money, Culture, and State Power

Historians have long wondered at the improbable rise of the Attalids of Pergamon after 188 BCE. The Roman-brokered Settlement of Apameia offered a new map – a brittle framework for sovereignty in Anatolia and the eastern Aegean. What allowed the Attalids to make this map a reality and leave their indelible Pergamene imprint on our Classical imagination? In this uniquely comprehensive study of the political economy of the kingdom, Noah Kaye rethinks the impact of Attalid imperialism on the Greek polis and the multicultural character of the dynasty's notorious propaganda. By synthesizing new findings in epigraphy, archaeology, and numismatics, he shows the kingdom for the first time from the inside. The Pergamene way of ruling was a distinctively non-coercive and efficient means of taxing and winning loyalty. Royal tax collectors collaborated with city and village officials on budgets and minting, while the kings utterly transformed the civic space of the gymnasium. "In the sunny, austere central hall of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, wrapping around the room's walls like a serpent, then rising halfway to the ceiling on marble steps, stands a strident, if also fragmentary statement of empire. It is an unfinished wedding cake of a building. Tourists recline languidly on its ascent, like guests with nowhere to sit. The room is just too small; it is overtaken by the object on display ̣- The Great Altar of Pergamon. The Altar, with its two sculptural friezes, the outer, depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants, the inner, the tale of Telephos, son of Herakles and heroic ancestor of the Attalid dynasty, was discovered in 1871, the year in which the Second German Empire was born. The engineer Karl Humann stumbled upon the marble fragments while building infrastructure for Ottoman Turkey, making the Altar as we know it a pure product of German, French and British competition for influence in the Middle East. Today, Turkey has regained confidence, and officials from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation expect Ankara to ask for it back"-- Provided by publisher Reveals how the empire of Attalid Pergamon dominated the Hellenistic world by controlling culture and identity through its fiscal system.