Anatolia

• 1. Introduction

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  Anatolia is a peninsula so central to human history that most of Europe carries its genetic fingerprint. About 9,000 years ago, farmers from this land began moving westward, and their descendants would eventually spread as far as the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles. Most modern Europeans derive a significant part of their ancestry from those Neolithic Anatolian farmers. Long before Turkey existed, long before Rome or Greece rose to power, this wedge of land between four seas was already shaping the world. How did a peninsula become the birthplace of farming's migration into Europe, of minted coinage, of early Christianity? And how did a place that once held dozens of distinct languages and peoples transform, through conquest and catastrophe, into something so profoundly different? The answers run from Göbekli Tepe in the prehistoric highlands to the population exchanges of 1923.

• 2. Land Between Four Seas

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  The Mediterranean bounds Anatolia to the south, the Aegean to the west, and the Black Sea to the north. The Bosporus, the Propontis, and the Hellespont form its northwestern edge, separating the peninsula from Thrace in southeastern Europe. This is not merely a geographic description. Each of those waterways has functioned as a corridor of movement, a boundary of empire, and a zone of conflict across thousands of years. The Sea of Marmara connects the Black Sea with the Aegean through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and its shores have seen Greek colonists, Roman legions, Byzantine fleets, and Ottoman warships.

  The terrain itself reinforces Anatolia's complexity. A central massif of uplifted blocks and downfolded troughs sits wedged between two folded mountain ranges that converge in the east. True lowland is rare, confined mostly to narrow coastal strips along the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Black Sea. The flat or gently sloping land that does exist clusters around places like the delta of the Kızıl River, the coastal plains of Çukurova, and the valleys of the Gediz and Büyük Menderes rivers. In the interior, the Konya Basin and the area around Lake Tuz represent the main flat expanses. Mount Ararat, the highest peak in the Eastern Anatolia region and in the Armenian Highlands, rises to 5,123 meters.

  The peninsula's climate is equally varied. The central plateau endures a continental regime of hot summers and cold, snowy winters. The south and west coasts enjoy mild, rainy winters and warm, dry summers typical of the Mediterranean. The Black Sea and Marmara coasts see warm, foggy summers and heavy rainfall year-round. That range of conditions supports a striking diversity of forests: temperate broadleaf and mixed forests in the north, deciduous oak forests and steppe across the central plateau, cedar of Lebanon and Taurus fir in the southern mountains, and maquis shrubland with Turkish pine along the Aegean lowlands.

• 3. The Name's Journey

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  Ἀνατολή, the Greek word meaning "the East," gives Anatolia its name. It comes from the verb anatello, meaning "to rise up," a reference to the direction of the rising sun. The parallel with other language families is close: the Latin "levant" from levo, "orient" from orior, and the Hebrew mizrach from the root meaning "to rise, to shine" all point to the same idea. Anatolia, in other words, means essentially the same thing as "the Orient."

  The name's scope shifted repeatedly. It may have originally referred to the Aeolian, Ionian, and Dorian colonies along the eastern Aegean coast. Under Roman Emperor Diocletian, the term stretched to encompass the entire Eastern Diocese. Under Constantine I, who ruled from 306 to 337, the Praetorian prefecture of the East encompassed all eastern regions of the Late Roman Empire, from Thrace to Egypt. Only after the 7th-century loss of other eastern territories did the Byzantine Empire's remaining domain in Asia Minor become the primary referent for "the Eastern part" of the empire. At the same time, the Anatolic Theme was created as an administrative province centered around Iconium, ruled from the city of Amorium.

  The oldest name for any part of the peninsula is older still. The central region was called the "Land of Hatti," initially referring to the ancient Hattians and later applied to the entire territory under Hittite rule. The Greeks' first recorded name for the peninsula was Asia, possibly from an Akkadian expression for "sunrise" or from the Assuwa league in western Anatolia. As that word expanded to cover the entire continent, the phrase Asia Minor emerged to distinguish the peninsula. The Seljuk Turks who invaded in the 11th century understood Rōmanía, meaning "the land of the Romans," as another name for the place, and founded their Sultanate of Rûm in 1077. By the 12th century, Europeans had begun calling the region Turchia.

• 4. Before Writing Began

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  Çatalhöyük, dated to around 7,000 BCE, is considered the most advanced of Anatolia's Neolithic settlements, a list that also includes Göbekli Tepe, Çayönü, Nevali Cori, Hacilar, and several others. Human habitation in Anatolia reaches back to the Paleolithic, but it is the Neolithic story that carries the most consequence for the rest of the world. Advances in archaeogenetics have confirmed that the spread of farming from the Middle East into Europe was not simply a cultural exchange. It was a migration, strongly correlated with the movement of early farmers from Anatolia about 9,000 years ago.

  Those Anatolian Neolithic farmers derived most of their ancestry from local hunter-gatherers who had adopted agriculture in place, rather than arriving from elsewhere. They then spread westward across Europe and also south to the Maghreb. Levantine populations also carry significant Neolithic Anatolian farmer ancestry from later Bronze Age migrations. Around 6,500 years ago, a wave of eastern inflow made Anatolians more genetically homogeneous. Steppe ancestry, by contrast, does not appear in Anatolian populations until the Bronze Age.

  The question of where the Indo-European language family originated touches on Anatolia in an unresolved way. Some researchers have proposed Neolithic Anatolia as the homeland, though many linguists favor a later origin in the steppes north of the Black Sea. What is clear is that the Anatolian languages, the earliest attested branch of Indo-European, had been spoken in Anatolia since at least the 19th century BCE. The earliest historically attested populations were the Hattians of central Anatolia and the Hurrians further east. Their languages are both extinct; the Hattian tongue's affiliations remain unclear, while Hurrian belongs to the Hurro-Urartian family. Their main center was the city of Hattush.

• 5. Empires and Languages

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  Anatolia's historical records open with clay tablets found in the ruins of modern-day Kültepe, dating to approximately 2000 BCE. Those tablets belonged to an Assyrian trade colony, and they document a commerce that had been building for centuries. Organized trade between Anatolia and Mesopotamia began during the Akkadian Empire and intensified under the Old Assyrian Empire, between the 21st and the 18th centuries BCE. Assyrian traders brought tin and textiles and returned with copper, silver, or gold. Cuneiform records from around the 20th century BCE, found at the Assyrian colony of Kanesh, show an already sophisticated system of trading computations and credit lines.

  The Hittite kingdom, with its capital at Hattusa, co-existed in Anatolia with Palaians and Luwians from approximately 1700 to 1200 BCE. Around 750 BCE, Phrygia established itself with two centers, one at Gordium and one at modern-day Kayseri. Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language closer to Greek than to the older Anatolian tongues. Urartu, whose speakers used a non-Indo-European language and whose capital stood near Lake Van, fell in the seventh century BCE alongside Phrygia. In classical antiquity, the peninsula held a remarkable patchwork of tongues: Isaurian, Pisidian, Phrygian (which survived until the 7th century CE), Galatian Gaulish (spoken until the 6th century CE), Cappadocian, Armenian, and Kartvelian languages in the northeast.

  Anatolia is recognized as the birthplace of minted coinage as a medium of exchange, a development that occurred sometime in the 7th century BCE in Lydia. This distinguishes it from unminted coinage, which had appeared much earlier in Mesopotamia. In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great conquered the Anatolian peninsula from the Achaemenid Persian Empire, restored democracy to the Greek cities, and opened the interior to Greek settlement. By the 1st century BCE, local Anatolian languages had been supplanted by Greek. In 133 BCE, the last Attalid king bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Republic, bringing western and central Anatolia under Roman authority while Hellenistic culture remained dominant.

  Mithridates VI Eupator, ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia, launched war against the Roman Republic in 88 BCE to halt Roman expansion in the Aegean. His series of conflicts, the Mithridatic Wars, ended in Roman victory. His ally and son-in-law Tigranes the Great of Armenia briefly conquered significant portions of Anatolia, including Cilicia, Cappadocia, and Sophene. Pompey's annexation of the Kingdom of Pontus brought all of Anatolia under Roman control, though the southeastern frontier with the Parthian Empire remained unstable for centuries, generating military conflicts that culminated in the Roman-Parthian Wars of 54 BCE to 217 CE.

• 6. Transformation and Loss

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  In the 10 years following the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, Seljuk Turks from Central Asia spread over large areas of Anatolia, with concentrations especially along the northwestern rim. Turkish and Islam arrived with them, beginning a slow shift in the peninsula's character from predominantly Christian and Greek-speaking toward predominantly Muslim and Turkish-speaking, though Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians remained numerous for centuries. The Mongols swept through eastern and central Anatolia in 1255 and remained until 1335. Their Ilkhanate garrison was stationed near Ankara. After the Ilkhanate's decline, from 1335 to 1353, their legacy in the region was the Uyghur Eretna Dynasty, which was overthrown by Kadi Burhan al-Din in 1381.

  Osman I, who founded what became the Ottoman state, was the first Turkish ruler to mint coins in his own name, in the 1320s. Those coins bore the legend "Minted by Osman son of Ertugrul." Because minting was a prerogative reserved in Islamic practice for a sovereign, this act marked the formal independence of the Ottoman Turks from the Mongol Khans. The Ottomans completed their conquest of the peninsula in 1517 with the taking of Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, from the Knights of Saint John.

  The early 19th century brought accelerating displacement. As the Russian Empire expanded in the Caucasus, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and other Muslim groups left their homelands and resettled in Anatolia. As Ottoman territory shrank in the Balkans, Balkan Muslims including Bosniaks, Albanians, and Bulgarian Muslims were relocated to formerly Christian villages across the peninsula. At the same time, Greeks from Anatolia, Constantinople, and the Pontus area migrated toward the independent Kingdom of Greece and to the United States, Russia, and Latin America.

  During World War I, the Armenian genocide, the Greek genocide particularly in Pontus, and the Assyrian genocide almost entirely removed the ancient indigenous communities of those populations from Anatolia. Between 1894 and 1924, about two million Greeks and an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turkish authorities or expelled. According to Morris and Ze'evi, 4 million Christians were ethnically cleansed from Asia Minor by the Turks across that period. Following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, most remaining ethnic Anatolian Greeks were forced out during the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Fewer than 5,000 Greeks remain in Anatolia today.

  Turkey's First Geography Congress in 1941 divided the country into seven geographical regions and placed the eastern provinces, largely corresponding to the historical region of Western Armenia, into the Eastern Anatolia region. According to historian Richard Hovannisian, this renaming was necessary to obscure evidence of the Armenian presence as part of the policy of Armenian genocide denial. Archaeologist Lori Khatchadourian has observed that the differing terminologies for this region primarily result from the shifting political fortunes and cultural trajectories of the area since the 19th century. A growing body of scholarship, as noted by Vazken Davidian, is uncomfortable with calling the Ottoman East "Eastern Anatolia."