Antalya is named after the king who founded it. The city was laid out as Attaleia during the reign of Attalos II Philadelphos of Pergamon, between 159 and 139 BC — late, by the standards of this coast, where the towns around it were already centuries old.
The coastal plain it sits on is Pamphylia, and the name is Greek, not Anatolian: it means something like the country where people of all peoples live. Ancient writers offered genealogies for it — a daughter of Mopsos, a daughter of Kabderos, a sister of Rhakios and Manto — and Pliny and Mela, working from those, said the region had earlier been called Mopsopia. The Ministry of Culture's own account treats these as legend and suggests something more prosaic: that Greek intellectuals coined the name for the mixed population left by migrants arriving at the start of the Iron Age. Where exactly Pamphylia began and ended was never fixed either, and the ancient sources disagree.
