The Acropolis was settled long before the rise of classical Athens. Neolithic settlers climbed its steep flanks as early as the fourth millennium BCE, drawn by its defensible position and the water sources around the limestone. By the Late Bronze Age, Mycenaean kings had fortified the summit with a wall of massive irregular stones, a technique so imposing that the later Greeks called it Cyclopean, after the one-eyed giants of myth who were said to have built it. Homer, writing around 750 BCE, knew the rock as the "strong-built house of Erechtheus," a reference to a legendary king associated with Athens's earliest origins. Another early king, Cecrops, was imagined as half man and half serpent, and the name Cecropia was linked to him. The Acropolis was already old when the first myths were told about it.

The most famous of those myths is the contest, told in several versions. Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom and war who had sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus, desired the city for her own. Poseidon, her uncle and the god of earthquakes and the sea, desired it too. Neither would yield, and Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled from Mount Olympus with his thunderbolt, feared that their rivalry would tear the heavens apart. In one retelling, the gods would present gifts to the city and Cecrops, the autochthonous ruler with a serpent's tail, would judge which was more valuable. Apollodorus instead makes the twelve gods the judges and Cecrops an important witness. The people of Athens gathered on the summit of the rock to watch.

Poseidon struck first. He raised his three-pronged trident and drove it into the limestone with such force that the mountain shook. From the wound in the rock, water burst forth in a fountain. The crowd cheered until they tasted it. The water was salt, as useless for drinking as the sea itself. Some later poets said Poseidon offered a horse instead, the first horse ever seen, while the brackish spring features in the familiar Athenian account. Then Athena knelt and planted something small in the soil. An olive tree rose before them, silver-leaved and heavy with fruit, a gift that offered food, oil for lamps, wood, and shade from the Attic sun. Cecrops declared Athena the winner, and the city took her name. Poseidon, enraged, flooded the Thriasian plain and laid parts of Attica beneath the sea, but the name held. Athens would be the city of Athena, and the Acropolis would be her throne.

The rock became the heart of Athenian religion. Sanctuaries on the summit honoured Athena Polias, the goddess as guardian of the city. During the sixth century BCE the sanctuary developed further, and the Panathenaia became a major celebration of Athenian identity. The greater festival, held every four years, included a grand procession through the city and the presentation of a woven robe to Athena's ancient wooden image, later housed in the Erechtheion. That temple, built between 421 and 406 BCE, was unique in all Greece. It was not dedicated to one god but to many: Athena, Poseidon, Erechtheus, and even the hero Boutes. Inside its walls, visitors could still see the mark of Poseidon's trident scratched into the floor rock, and in a small courtyard grew an olive tree that the Athenians claimed was the direct descendant of Athena's original gift. The Erechtheion's south porch was held up by six marble women, the Caryatids, whose originals have been replaced on the monument by copies. Five originals are in the Acropolis Museum, while the sixth is in the British Museum.

But it was the Parthenon that made the Acropolis immortal. After the Persians sacked Athens in 480 BCE and burned the old temples to blackened rubble, damaged sculptures were buried in deposits on the Acropolis. About thirty years later, under Pericles, a leading statesman of the democratic age, the Athenians began an ambitious rebuilding programme. The Parthenon, dedicated to Athena Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, was constructed and decorated between 447 and 432 BCE from gleaming Pentelic marble. Inside stood the chryselephantine statue of Athena by Phidias, the greatest sculptor of antiquity: forty feet tall, her face and arms of ivory, her helmet and robe of hammered gold, a spear in one hand and a winged Victory in the other. The temple's sculptural programme told the whole story of Athens: the birth of Athena on the east pediment, her contest with Poseidon on the west, the battle of gods and giants on the eastern metopes, and the procession of the Panathenaia itself winding across the inner frieze. Every stone was a claim that Athens was the centre of civilisation.

The Acropolis has outlasted the civilisation that built it. The Parthenon became a Christian church and later an Ottoman mosque. During the Venetian siege of 1687, ammunition stored inside it exploded, shattering much of the building. Lord Elgin removed sculptures in the early nineteenth century. Yet the rock endures, its limestone still warm in the Attic sun, its temples still commanding the plain below. In 1987 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains an internationally recognised archaeological site.