[4][5] The ruins of the city are located west of the modern village Tekin in the Germencik district of Aydın Province, Turkey.

[11] In the fifth century BC, the exiled Athenian Themistocles came to Persia to offer his services to Artaxerxes, and was given control of Magnesia to support his family.

[12] The word "magnet" possibly derives from lodestones found around Magnesia ad Sipylum, a neighbouring city with a similar name.

[13] In the time of the Romans, Magnesia was added to the kingdom of Pergamon, after Antiochus had been driven eastward beyond Mount Taurus.

A great quadrennial festival called the Leucophryna (Λευκόφρυνα) was held in the city and people from all over the Greek world gathered there.

[19] Magnesia contained a temple of Dindymene, the mother of the gods; the wife or daughter of Themistocles was said to have been a priestess of that divinity.

The change in the site of the town alluded to by Strabo, is not noticed by other contemporary authors, however some suggest that Magnesia was moved from the banks of the Meander to a place at the foot of Mount Thorax three miles from the river.

Excavations were resumed at the site, after an interval of almost 100 years, in 1984, by Orhan Bingöl of the University of Ankara and the Turkish Ministry of Culture.