Pergamon and Aizanoi: a Hellenistic Inner Aegean threshold

It would be inaccurate to present Pergamon and Aizanoi as a continuous visitor route or as one political system in every period. Aizanoi's official record does, however, state that the area was successively attached to Pergamon and Bithynia in the Hellenistic period before coming under Roman rule in 133 BCE. That explicit record makes it possible to compare Pergamon in the Bakırçay plain and Aizanoi at Çavdarhisar within a changing inland context of the same broad era. Aizanoi's layers around the Penkalas/Kocaçay, together with the Temple of Zeus, theatre-stadium arrangement, macellum, bridges and water works, show it not as an extension of Pergamon but as a Phrygian centre with its own urban scale. UNESCO's Pergamon record likewise reads the acropolis together with the settlement and period layers of a wider historic landscape. The bridge in this story explains historical context; it does not claim a modern transport route, continuing access or that every remain belongs to the same period.