Pergamon: The Library Built to Beat Alexandria

In a room on the acropolis at Pergamon, excavators found the base for a large statue and, nearby, a copy of Phidias's Athena standing more than three metres tall. The walls of the room carry a regular row of holes at about shelf height. Those holes are the main reason the room is labelled a library. They might be sockets for wooden shelving. They might be something else entirely.

A capital that wanted to be Alexandria

The Attalid kings ran a small, rich state from a hilltop in western Anatolia. Under Eumenes II, who reigned from 197 to 159 BCE, Pergamon was rebuilt to look like a rival to any city in the Greek world: a theatre cut into a cliff, the great altar now in Berlin, a sanctuary of Athena, and a royal library modelled directly on the Museum and Library at Alexandria, which had a century's head start.

Ancient figures put the Pergamon collection at around 200,000 rolls. Alexandria's reported totals are bigger and no more trustworthy. The two cities competed for scholars and for texts, and Pergamon became the home of a school of criticism under Crates of Mallos that argued with Alexandria's scholars about how to read Homer. Libraries were prestige projects and political tools. This is the same world in which a Roman regime would later collect and burn two thousand prophetic books in a single year to control what stayed in circulation.

The papyrus embargo

The famous part of the Pergamon story is about writing material. Pliny the Elder, citing the scholar Varro, says that when the rivalry between Ptolemy of Egypt and Eumenes over their libraries grew fierce, Ptolemy banned the export of papyrus, and parchment was invented at Pergamon to fill the gap. The Latin term for the treated skin, charta pergamena, is where the English word parchment comes from.

The story is too neat to trust. Herodotus, writing four centuries before Pliny, already mentions Ionian Greeks writing on skins when papyrus ran short, and treats it as an old practice even then. Prepared animal skin had been used as a writing surface across the Near East for centuries. Whatever happened at Pergamon, it was not an invention. And Vitruvius, who tells the same library rivalry, does not mention parchment at all; in his version Ptolemy's jealousy leads him to jail the Alexandrian librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium on suspicion that he was about to defect to Pergamon.

What scholars will grant is smaller and less quotable. Pergamon may have increased its production of writing skins, or improved their preparation, or simply come to rely on them heavily, under a papyrus shortage that may well have been real. Over time the best-quality skin picked up the city's name. The embargo may even have happened. The line that Pergamon therefore invented parchment is Varro reaching for an ending.

The gift that probably was not made

The library's most repeated moment is its disappearance into Egypt. Plutarch reports that Calvisius, a supporter of Octavian, accused Mark Antony of handing Cleopatra 200,000 volumes from the Pergamon library for the collection at Alexandria. Plutarch reports the charge and then, in the next breath, says Calvisius was believed to have invented most of his accusations.

Modern historians who mention the gift almost always carry that caveat with them. It is a propaganda charge, made by a hostile witness, during a war Antony was losing. There is no independent evidence that any such transfer took place, and the round figure of 200,000 is suspiciously the same number given for the whole library's size. It survives because it is a good story about a Roman handing Greek learning to a foreign queen, in the same way the burning of the Library of Alexandria survives as a scene despite the evidence for it being thin and contradictory.

No fire, no sack, just silence

What actually became of the Pergamon library is that nothing dramatic is recorded. The kingdom passed to Rome in 133 BCE under the will of its last king. The city stayed a centre of learning well into the Roman imperial period. The collection is simply never described again as a collection. Like most ancient libraries it seems to have been dispersed, left uncopied, and allowed to rot, with no single event to point at.

The one comparable research project we can actually name, the emperor Claudius's twenty books on Etruscan history, had native informants, state funding and an endowed annual public reading behind it, and still vanished the same quiet way, without a fire.

The room on the acropolis is still there, its walls still carrying that unexplained line of holes. The guidebooks call it the library. The archaeologists who named it in the 1880s were making an educated guess, and the guess has held for well over a century, partly on the evidence and partly because a city that set out to beat Alexandria really ought to have kept its books somewhere, and this was the likeliest room.