Recent survey work has shown that the country around Manisa was widely settled in the third millennium BC, and some of it much earlier. The black burnished finds from Alibeyli, Araplı, Hacırahmanlı and Halitpaşa, all now in Saruhanlı district, are dated to the fourth millennium BC, and the coarse burnished ware from Nuriye and Ulucak to the fifth.
For the second millennium there are written sources. Pliny records that Magnesia was called Sipyleum and that before that it was known as Tantalis — a name scholars connect with king Tantalos, whose mythological and historical identities overlap. Tantalos appears with his daughter Niobe and his son Pelops, and the landscape still carries them: the Weeping Rock natural monument is Niobe, and the throne of Pelops is on Mount Sipylos.
