Bergama's past reaches back to 3000 BC and its oldest known name is Pergamon. Perg, or berg, means mountain, hill, high, a place hard to reach — that is its sense in Luwian, one of the oldest Anatolian languages, and it says plainly that the city was founded on the acropolis hill. The name is Pergamon in Latin, Bergame in French and Bergama in Turkish.
In myth the city was founded by a son of Herakles and took its name from Pergamos, a descendant of the Trojan hero Achilles.
The first historical record of Bergama is in Xenophon. On his way back from Anatolia to Greece he stopped here for a time and took the city from the Persian governor Asidates. Alexander of Macedon took it in 337 BC, and after the battle of Ipsos in 301 BC it was occupied by Lysimachos, the ruler of Thrace.
One defeat created a kingdom. Lysimachos was beaten at Sardis by his own commander Philetairos, and Philetairos, holding nine thousand talents of war booty, laid the foundation of the Attalid kingdom, which began in 283 BC and lasted a hundred and fifty years — Eumenes I, Attalos I and their successors. The acropolis, the Asklepion, the Red Basilica and the Bergama museum each have their own page here; together they are on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the multi-layered cultural landscape of Bergama.
