Ancient Anatolia
There have been many archaeological evidence of a thriving neolithic culture in Anatolia at least as early as seventh millennium BC What may the world’s first urban settlement (dated ca be. 6500 BC) has been on Çatalhüyük in Konya Ovasi (Konya Basin) revealed. Introduced in the early third millennium BC, from the metallurgy possible a flourishing “copper age” (ca. 2500-2000 BC), in which cultural patterns throughout the region were remarkably uniform. The use of weapons and tools made of bronze, it was around 2000 BC spread colonies of the Assyrian merchants, who settled in Anatolia during the Bronze Age, provided metal for the military empires of Mesopotamia, and their accounts and business correspondence, the earliest written records in Anatolia found. From about 1500 BC, southern Anatolia, the abundant sources of ore and numerous furnace sites, was developed as a center of iron production. Two of the area’s most celebrated archaeological excavations are the sites of Troy and Hattusas (Bogazkoy) (see Figure 2).
The cape projecting into the Aegean between the Dardanelles and the Gulf of Edremit was known in antiquity as Troas. There, a thirty-meter high hill named Hisarlik was started as a site of ancient Troy in excavations by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s identified. The first five steps of the nine discovered on Hisarlik contained remains of cities from the third millennium BC that controlled access to the fastest crossing of the Dardanelles and that probably derived their prosperity from tolls. Artifacts are evidence of 1000 years of cultural continuity in the cities built on these levels. A sharp break with the past that occurred on the sixth level, settled about 1900 BC by newcomers believed have been linked to the early Greeks.Built after an earthquake devastated city of the previous 1300 BC, the seventh level was clearly the victim of sacking and burning about 1150 BC, and it has been so recognized the Troy Homer’s Iliad. Hisarlik later was the site of a Greek city, Ilion, and a Roman one, Ilium.
Hittites
End of the third millennium BC, waves of invaders speaking Indo-European languages crossed the Caucasus to Anatolia. Among them were the bronze-work, car-borne warriors who conquered and settled the central plain. Based on older cultures these invaders borrowed even their name, the Hittites, from the indigenous Hatti whom they had been subjected. She took the local deities Hattic and adapted to their written language the cuneiform alphabet and literary conventions of the Semitic cultures of Mesopotamia. The Hittites imposed their political and social organization on their dominions in the Anatolian interior and northern Syria, where the indigenous peasantry supported the Hittite warrior caste with rents, services and taxes. In time the Hittites won reputation as merchants and statesmen who schooled the ancient Middle East, both in trade and diplomacy. The Hittite Empire achieved the zenith of his political power and cultural achievement in the fourteenth and thirteenth century BC, but the state collapsed after 1200 BC when the Phrygians, clients of the Hittites, rebelled and burned Hattusas.
Phrygians and Lydians
By Twelfth to the ninth century BC. were a time of turmoil in Anatolia and the Aegean. The destruction of Troy, Hattusas and many other cities in the region was a collective disaster that coincided with the rise of the aggressive Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Dorian invasion of Greece, the appearance of the “Sea Peoples”, the Aegean hit and eastern Mediterranean.
The first light to penetrate the dark age in Anatolia was the very Phrygians who had set fire Hattusas destroyed. Architects, builders and skilled workers of iron, they had assimilated the Hittites’ syncretic culture and adopted many of its political institutions. Phrygian kings apparently ruled most of western and central Anatolia in the ninth century BC, from their capital, Gordion (a site sixty kilometers southwest of Ankara modern). Phrygian strength soon waned, however, and the kingdom was overthrown in the seventh century BC by the Cimmerians, a nomadic people, which was pursued through the Caucasus to Anatolia by the Scythians.
Order was in Anatolia by the Lydians, a Thracian warrior caste who dominated the indigenous peasants restored and won her great wealth from alluvial gold in the tributaries of the Hermus River (Gediz Nehri) found. From her farm in Sardis, the Lydian kings as Croesus as controlled western Anatolia until their kingdom fell to the Persians in 546 BC
Armenians and Kurds
The Armenians took refuge in the Lake Van region in the seventh century BC, apparently in reaction to Cimmerian raids. Their land was described by Xenophon around 400 BC as a tributary of Persia. By the first century BC, a united kingdom that had Armenian stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea has been a client of the Roman Empire, founded to the border with Persia buffer.
Xenophon also recorded the presence of the Kurds. Contemporary linguistic evidence has previously held view that the Kurds are descendants of the Medes challenged, although many Kurds still accept this explanation of their origin. Kurdish people migrated from the Eurasian steppes in the second millennium BC and joined indigenous people living in the region.
Greeks
The Aegean coast of Anatolia was an integral part of a Minoan-Mycenaean culture (c. 2600-1200 BC) that drew its cultural impulses from Crete. During the Aegean region, the so-called Dark Age (ca. 1050-800 BC), Ionian Greek refugees fled across the sea to Anatolia, then under Lydian rule, to escape the onslaught of the Dorians. Many other cities were along the Anatolian coast during the great period of Greek expansion after the eighth century BC One of them founded in Byzantium, a distant colony on the Bosphorus was founded by the city-state of Megara. flourished founded Despite endemic political unrest, the cities of the Ionians and subsequent Greek settlers from trading in Phrygia and Lydia, grew in size and number, and generated a renaissance of Ionia, that brought in the cultural vanguard of the Hellenic world.
At first the Greeks welcomed the Persians, grateful to be freed from Lydian control. But to impose as the Persians, unpopular tyrants on the city-states began the Greeks rebelled and called their relatives in Greece for help. In 334 BC Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont, defeated the Persians at the Granicus River (Biga Çayi), and during four years of campaigning liberated the Ionian city-states, integration into an empire that at his death in 323 BC extended from the Nile to the Indus.
After Alexander died, was control of Anatolia by the Macedonian generals several contested under which his empire was divided. BC To 280th One of them, Seleucus Nicator, had good his claim to an extensive empire, the southern and western Anatolia and Thrace, and Syria, Mesopotamia, in the price and for a time in Persia. Under the dynasty of the Seleucids, which were up 64 BC, colonists survived, brought from Greece, and the process of Hellenization was renewed on the non-Greek elites.
The Seleucids were plagued by rebellions, and their domains in Anatolia were steadily eaten away by secession and attacks by rival Hellenistic regimes. Pergamon became independent in 262 BC, during the Attalids dynasty, and gained fame as the epitome of Hellenistic states.Known for the cleanliness of the streets and the splendor of his art, Pergamon, derived in west-central Anatolia, its extraordinary wealth from trade in pitch, parchment, and perfume, while slave labor produced a food surplus on scientifically managed state farms. There was also a center of learning that boasted a medical school and a library second only glory, that of Alexandria. But Pergamum was both despised and envied by the other Greek states because of his alliance with Rome.
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