There was a second, smaller and less well-preserved high relief frieze on the inner court walls which surrounded the actual fire altar on the upper level of the structure at the top of the stairs.

In a set of consecutive scenes, it depicts events from the life of Telephus, legendary founder of the city of Pergamon and son of the hero Heracles and Auge, one of Tegean king Aleus's daughters.

[1] Until the second half of the 20th century it had been assumed by some scholars that the altar was endowed in 184 BC by Eumenes II after a victory over the Celtic Tolistoagian tribe and their leader Ortiagon.

As the most important marble edifice of the Hellenistic residence and indeed erected in a prominent position, it was assuredly not begun only at the conclusion of numerous initiatives to upgrade the acropolis of Pergamon under Eumenes II.

Thus the founder of Rome, Romulus, was traditionally nursed only by a she-wolf, whereas Telephus, to whom the Attalids trace their ancestry, is shown in the frieze being suckled by a she-lion.

[4] According to his findings, the altar was erected between 166 and 156 BC as a general victory monument commemorating the triumphs of the Pergamenes, and especially of Eumenes II, over the Macedonians, the Galatians and the Seleucids, and was designed by Phyromachos, the seventh and last of the greatest Greek sculptors, who included Myron, Phidias, Polykleitos, Scopas, Praxiteles and Lysippos.

It is supposed that the Athena temple located on the acropolis terrace above it may have been its cultic point of reference, and the altar possibly served solely as a place of sacrifice.

[8] Probably in the 2nd century, the Roman Lucius Ampelius recorded in his liber memorialis ("Notebook"), in Chapter VIII (Miracula Mundi): "At Pergamum there is a great marble altar, 40 feet (12 m) high, with colossal sculptures.

Since a reassessment of the perception and interpretation of antiquities dating from other than "classical" periods took place in the course of the 20th century, it is undisputed that the great altar of Pergamon is one of the most significant works, if not the apex, of Hellenistic art.

In 1625 William Petty, chaplain to Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, a collector and art patron, traveled through Turkey, visited Pergamon, and brought back to England two relief panels from the altar.

He urged the preservation of the antiquities on the acropolis and attempted to find partners to assist in an excavation; as a private person he was not equal to such a major task, lacking the financial and logistic resources.

It was important to begin excavation work as soon as possible because the local inhabitants of Bergama (the modern name of the ancient city of Pergamon) were using the altar and other above-ground ruins as a quarry, were looting the remnants of antique constructions in order to erect new buildings, and were burning some of the marble for lime.

Alexander Conze, who was appointed director of the sculpture collection of Berlin's royal museums in 1877, was the first person to connect the fragments with the Ampelius text and realize their significance.

The timing was good, because the German government was anxious to match the other great powers also on a cultural level after the German Empire was established in 1871: It is very important for the museums' collections, which are so far very deficient in Greek originals […] to now gain possession of a Greek work of art of a scope which, more or less, is of a rank close to or equal to the sculptures from Attica and Asia Minor in the British Museum.

Based on an agreement[19] between the Ottoman Empire and the German government, starting in 1879 the relief panels from the Pergamon Altar along with some other fragments came to Berlin and into the possession of the Collection of Antiquities.

We are not insensitive to what it means to remove the remnants of a great monument from their original location and bring them to a place where we can never again provide the lighting and environment in which they were created and in which they once conveyed their full effect.

But there was obviously no overall concept, and given the reigning idea of a major architecture museum presenting examples of all Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, the display of the altar had to be condensed.

The clamps and fasteners which connected the individual fragments and also served to anchor the frieze and sculpture to the wall were made of iron, which had started to rust.

The path connecting the lower part of the town with the acropolis led directly past the self-contained and now extended sacred altar area, which could be accessed from the east.

It was probably the case that the altar arose in direct relationship to the redesigning of the acropolis and was to be regarded as a primary, new construction and votive offering to the gods.

The upper visible structure consisted of a pedestal, a frieze of slabs 2.3 meters (7' 6") in height with high relief scenes, and a thick, projecting cornice.

The frieze narrates in chronological order the life of Telephus, one of the heroes of Greek mythology; the legend is also known from written records, for example in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from the 5th century BC.

Since there was only a limited amount of space available in the upper, internal courtyard where the actual fire altar was located, the Telephus frieze was sculpted on slabs that were shallower than in the case of the Gigantomachy.

How extensively the altar area was furnished with bronze and marble statues is still unknown, but it is certain that the embellishments must have been extraordinarily rich and have represented a major expenditure for the donors.

When analyzing the various inscriptions it could be determined on the basis of the typeface that there was an older and a younger sculptor generation at work, which makes the coherence of the entire frieze all the more remarkable.

The "Jubilee Exhibition of the Berlin Academy of Arts" in May and June 1886 devoted a 13,000 square meter site to archaeological acquisitions from recent excavations in Olympia and Pergamon.

Wilhelm Kreis chose for his Soldiers' Hall at the Army High Command headquarters in Berlin (1937/38) and for a never-realized warriors' monument at the foot of Mount Olympus in Greece a building shape which was very similar to the Pergamon Altar.

Referencing this architectural form was not least in tune with the ideological concepts of the Nazis; an altar prompted ideas of being ready to sacrifice and heroic death.

[49] Some of the media and population criticized the use of the Pergamon Altar as a backdrop for the application submitted by the city of Berlin to host the Olympic summer games in 2000.

In 2013, the Pergamon 2nd Life project, a fictional, artistically inspired photographic reconstruction of the Gigantomachy frieze, celebrated its public world premiere in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.