A City on a Hill

‘ You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’  Matthew 5:14

On the day that I first stepped into the camel barn and instantly decided that it would become the library of my dreams, I was  unaware that the ruins one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world were situated only a few miles away from Ayvalik, at Pergamon. Pergamon was the literal embodiment of the biblical metaphor of the city on a hill, standing high on a rocky bluff 16 miles inland from the Aegean, about 1,000 feet above the surrounding plain.  Its ruins still stand there, looking down on the modern Turkish city of Bergama.

Pergamon  -   mentioned in the book of Revelation, which accuses it of housing the ‘Throne of Satan’ - became important during the Hellenistic period  (the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC ) when colonists established Greek cities and kingdoms in  Asia and Africa. Under the Attalid kings, the Kingdom of Pergamon controlled a large part of western Asia Minor (i.e. most of the western half of  present day Turkey).

The last Attalid king, dying without an heir, bequeathed his lands to the Romans in 133 BC, and Pergamon became  the capital of the Asian province of the Roman Empire,  continuing to be a  commercial and cultural centre of major importance, with a population of 150,000.

Pergamon’s decline began when the Goths arrived in 262AD, after which it was ruled by a series of other invaders before, eventually, being abandoned and falling into ruins. This city on a hill was not hidden, but simply forgotten for over a thousand years until 1871, when a German railway engineer bought some old mosaics from local farmers, and later came back to excavate the site.  Much of what was excavated, including the enormous altar of the Temple of Zeus,  was taken to Germany,  where it is displayed in the Pergamon Museum , part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Nevertheless the ruined buildings which remain – like the partly reconstructed Temple of Zeus, below - testify to Pergamon’s lost magnificence,

while the drawing below gives some idea of what the city would have looked like in its prime.

It was during the reign of  the Attalid king Eumenes II (197-159 BC) that most of the major buildings of Pergamon were erected, including its  famous library. Eumenes II wished to make  Pergamon  a major cultural and artistic centre, and built a theatre seating 10,000 (the steepest  theatre in the ancient world), a library, a large gymnasium complex, and a number of temples and altars.

In order to establish his new library as an important centre of learning which could rival Alexandria,  the greatest library of the ancient world, Eumenes II recruited Crates of Mallus, a Stoic philosopher – now best known for having constructed the earliest known globe representing the Earth - as its resident scholar.

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, the Pergamon library contained about 200,000 volumes: not, of course, books in the form we have them today, but manuscripts written on to parchment, and then rolled into scrolls. One of the legends of Pergamum, related in Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’ , is that parchment was invented there: previously, all books were written on papyrus, produced only in Egypt. The story goes that  King Ptolemy, ruler of Egypt, feared the library at Alexandria might lose its pre-eminence to Pergamon. He therefore banned further exports of papyrus to Pergamon, to prevent the library from increasing its holdings.

Pergamon responded by beginning to produce its manuscripts on parchment – thinly stretched sheep or goat skin – thus breaking the stranglehold the Egyptians had over the dissemination of information , with the result that, as Pliny puts it -

‘ afterwards the material on which the immorality of humans depends spread indiscriminately.’

- a sentiment frequently echoed today in relation to the ubiquity of  pornography since the invention of the internet.

Since  parchment was used in Asia Minor well before the time of the Pergamum library, this story would not seem to be entirely true, but it is an appealing one, nevertheless. So, too,  is the other great legend of the Pergamon library, which concerns Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch relates that when in 35 BC the Roman general Mark Antony married Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs (the dynasty descended from one of  Alexander the Great's generals who had seized control over Egypt after Alexander's death) , he gave her the entire contents of the Pergamon library as a wedding present, to replace volumes lost in fires at the Alexandria library,  and thus brought to a sudden end Pergamon’s days as a major centre of learning.

Scholars disagree as whether or not this story is true, but when you visit Pergamon, and wander around the ruins trying to find the location of the library, it doesn’t seem to matter very much exactly how things ended. The library has been gone for 2,000 years, and very little of its structure remains. It’s also quite hard to find, but I persevered, since my first visit to Pergamon was by way of being a pilgrimage,  to pay homage to one of the legendary libraries of history before beginning to create my own, rather smaller, version.

Eventually I found the site of the library, but there was little to see: the outline of the building, and a few stones. There was something nearby, however, that was a rather more arresting sight:

This monumental headless torso, part of a statue of the Emperor Trajan, immediately brought to mind Shelley’s  Ozymandias, King of Kings, of whom all that is left are ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’
standing in the desert.

Here, I thought, was Ozymandias’ missing trunk at last.

And then it occurred to me that if, like Shelley’s traveller in an antique land, one were to travel round Turkey and explore more of the many ruined ancient cities of  Asia Minor, it would be quite possible to assemble a complete Ozymandias from the countless pieces of statuary scattered across the landscape.

A head, perhaps, from amongst those frozen deities that stand for all eternity on the peak of Mount Nemrut, built 2,000 years ago for the eternal glory of  King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene:

We might also add  the 5 foot long right arm of  the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius,  bearing a globe,  recently discovered in the ruins of Sagalassos, high in the western Toros mountains, which  was destroyed by an earthquake between 540AD and 620AD:

I could go on. 

Asia Minor is, quite literally, littered with innumerable  pieces of stone left by the astonishing array of  civilisations that have emerged from, or moved into, this part of the world: the Hattis, Hittites and Hourrites, the Uruartians, Phrygians and Lydians, the Assyrians,  Persians,  Greeks and the Trojans, the Romans, Byzantines, Selcuks and Ottomans. That is only a partial list: there are many more.

This land wears empires lightly, though.

Nowhere else demonstrates quite like Asia Minor the vanity of human wishes, as all those broken memorials to long-forgotten kings and emperors bear witness:

‘And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’