The Attalids of Pergamon and Anatolia: Money, Culture, and State Power
By Noah Kaye
ISBN: 978-1316510599
Cambridge University Press (2022) - £22.99
While the Attalids ruled a small corner of Anatolia in the early Hellenistic period, after the Treaty of Apamea, a peace agreement between the Romans and the Seleucids in 188 BC, their kingdom included most of western Anatolia, from the Sea of Marmara to the Mediterranean. As Noah Kaye writes, “the Attalids’ was an overnight empire” (p. 2). For rulers in the Hellenistic period, legitimacy of their rule relied, first and foremost, on the idea that the lands they ruled were ‘spear-won’, i.e. military might made right. The Attalids had no such claim for their new lands, but they quickly consolidated their rule over their new territories. It is precisely “how the Attalids’ empire came to be entrenched, so quickly” (p. 5) that Kaye seeks to understand.
Kaye’s investigation is primarilyearmarking” – allocating revenue for specific expenditures, such as a grain fund, for example – “as a social process, arguing that the static earmarking arrangements of our sources were negotiated into existence” (p. 39). Kaye demonstrates how these negotiations between local communities and the Attalids encouraged the locals to engage with the Attalid state and in doing so become embedded in it. Chapter two examines the “broader Attalid fiscal system” (p. 76), the various ways that the Attalids taxed their subjects. Then, in chapter three, Kaye looks at cistophoric coinage, a new closed coinage system introduced by the Attalids in the early second century BC.
