Culture:
Greek and Roman occupations through the Byzantine and up to the present times. Attalid capital city.
Location:
25 kilometers east of the Aegean coast in Turkey, Pergamum is the ancient name for the present city called Bergama.
Dates Occupied:
The first historical record for Pergamum is after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, when Lysimachus, one of his lieutenants, chose to store 9000 gold talents there. The city of Bergama is a modern city.
Architecture to Visit:
Acropolis, Aesclepium (where the famous doctor Galen is said to have worked), Temple of Trajan, Theatre, Serapeum.
Museum/Gift Shop:
Many of the artifacts from the earlier German excavations are stored in the Pergamon Museum of Berlin; but there is a Bergama Museum in the town of Bergama which has cultural materials from excavations after 1936.
Recommended Reading:
Some good websites are available, linked on the right; the most recent excavations at described on the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut (DAI) web site.
Excavators and Excavations:
Earliest excavations were in 1878, by German archaeologists Carl Humann, Alexander Conze, and R. Bohn; Dörpfeld also excavated here in the first decade of the 20th century. More recent excavations have been conducted by E. Boehringer, including some restorations. Current work is by Wolfgang Radt of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut (DAI).
Alternative Names and Spellings:
Pergamus, Bergama, Pergamon, Pergamos
Why You Should Go:
Pergamum was one of the churches mentioned in the Christian bible book called Revelations and was one of the principle capitals of Hellenistic Greece. Excavations indicate it was probably first settled in the Early Bronze Age; standing architecture for the ancient site is primarily Greek and Roman but there are Byzantine elements that are worth seeing as well.
