The ramified monetary system of the Attalid kingdom is described and its relationship to other monetary systems of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period explained. The character of the cistophoric coinage was neither fully royal nor civic, but should rather be understood as a “coordinated coinage” that required the cooperation of both polis and Attalid authorities. Local monetary needs could dictate the shape of the money supply, as in the signal case of Tralles. The burden and profits of epichoric coinage at regional scale were shared, while the kings ceded symbolic space on the coin types for representations of civic identity. Cooperation can also be glimpsed in countermarks and proxy coinages. Unlike Ptolemaic Egypt, the Attalid kingdom was not a closed currency zone, though the cistophori helped integrate vast new territories. Their reduced weight standard economized on silver, but Pergamene mines existed in Anatolia and should be factored into explanatory models.

Why Pergamon? Our story began with ten Roman commissioners, who in 188 BCE drew up a new map for cis-Tauric Asia after the defeat of Antiochos III at Magnesia-under-Sipylos. That map was an artifact of the Settlement of Apameia. A century-old Mediterranean interstate system had broken down at the end of the third century, and the Romans’ map proposed just two pieces of a new geopolitical order, the partition of the Anatolian peninsula between two allies, Rhodes and Pergamon. The failure of Rhodes to integrate or even retain control over its share along the south coast in Lycia and Caria is emblematic of the fact that enforcement of the settlement fell to the actors on the ground. The Romans withdrew and did not soon return, even as Pan-Anatolian wars between Pontos, Pergamon, Bithynia, and their respective allies embroiled the entire region for a decade. While a cunning and opportunistic diplomacy had helped put the Attalids in a position to win an empire, sovereignty over these vast new territories and peoples was never guaranteed. This was the basic assumption of an inquiry into the mechanics of imperial rule, rapid state formation, and the ideological tendencies of the Pergamene kings. My central argument was that the Attalids creatively employed noncoercive means to capture control of Greek cities and Anatolian rural communities, ultimately, making local civic culture depend on their tax revenues.

The budgetary earmark was a key feature of public finance in the expanded Attalid kingdom and contributed to the success of the Pergamene imperial project. The dynamics and meaning of this administrative technique are thus explored in depth. Earmarking not only increased the quantity of money available to royal bureaucrats; it also made money into a medium for messaging. In a pointedly transparent manner, specific royal taxes and other revenues were earmarked for specific public goods. A series of inscriptions record the neat and final arrangements, but it is possible and even illuminating to reconstruct the entanglements of the process of negotiation by which these earmarks came into existence. The creation of an earmark required an interlocking of royal and civic fiscal institutions that further entrenched Attalid rule. The earmarking process posed ideological risks, as kings delved into the domain of private property and devolved agency to local actors, while also providing an arena for the display of providential care (pronoia) for royal subjects.

This chapter aims to present a story of North Arabia in which the Arabians play the part of the protagonist rather than the minor role in a story of empires. This is be done by investigating the Konfliktbeziehung (conflictual relation) between empires and local dynasties and analysing the influence of foreign forces in the self-representation, cross-cultural assimilation and propaganda of the Arabian elites. Through a focus on degrees of participation and mediation as well as on buffer zone policies, a comparison is made between the North Arabians and those of other similar political entities in the first millennium. In a similar fashion to other first-millennium political entities, the Jafnids adopted the Roman lingua franca and its system of belief. Nonetheless, they found a way to rebrand Rome’s ‘identity signs’ as their own, as suggested by their adherence to Miaphysitism. Therefore, the chapter sheds light on their relationship with faith and the Church through an inquiry into their role as agents of cultural transformations in sixth-century North Arabia.

An overview of the settlements of the Attalid kingdom is presented, and the impact of the Attalid state on rural Anatolia is assessed. In a countryside dominated by small-scale communities, villages, and towns, Pergamene officials interfaced with a wide variety of civic organizations. Unlike the other Hellenistic dynasties, the Attalids rarely undertook coercion-intensive urbanization projects or forced synoicism. Rather, the Attalids tended to leave communities in place and culturally autonomous, instead focusing their efforts on shaping the body politic and improving fiscal legibility by opportunistically fostering civic institutions of any type. As a result, soldier-settler towns with the status of katoikia ascended to polis-like prominence. Their representatives gained access to royal interlocuters without trading an indigenous Anatolian identity for the trappings of the Greek city, while the Attalids gained a host of new subjects in the countryside, including the emergent Mysians. Surgical interventions in the countryside after 188 BCE shored up select towns like Toriaion and Olbasa with polis institutions and territories.