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"In the sunny, austere central hall of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, wrapping around the room's walls like a serpent, then rising halfway to the ceiling on marble steps, stands a strident, if also fragmentary statement of empire. It is an unfinished wedding cake of a building. Tourists recline languidly on its ascent, like guests with nowhere to sit. The room is just too small; it is overtaken by the object on displayò - The Great Altar of Pergamon. The Altar, with its two sculptural friezes, the outer, depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants, the inner, the tale of Telephos, son of Herakles and heroic ancestor of the Attalid dynasty, was discovered in 1871, the year in which the Second German Empire was born. The engineer Karl Humann stumbled upon the marble fragments while building infrastructure for Ottoman Turkey, making the Altar as we know it a pure product of German, French and British competition for influence in the Middle East. Today, Turkey has regained confidence, and officials from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation expect Ankara to ask for it back"--
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Eating with the tax-collectors; 2. The skeleton of the state; 3. The king's money; 4. Cities and other civic organisms; 5. Hastening to the gymnasium; 6. Pergamene panhellenism; Conclusion; Appendix of Epigraphical Documents.
About the author
Noah Kaye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. He is an ancient historian who has worked extensively throughout the eastern Mediterranean, in Greece, where he was the Heinrich Schliemann Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, in Israel, where he was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Haifa, and in Turkey, where he was a Senior Fellow at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. He has conducted and published archaeological fieldwork in Greece (Molyvoti Thrace Archaeological Project) and Turkey (Boğsak Archaeological Survey, Cilicia). He is also an epigrapher and a numismatist, and has contributed to the multi-lingual corpus of inscriptions, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palestinae.
