Göbekli Tepe is nearly twelve thousand years old
The land of today’s Republic of Turkey holds some of humanity’s earliest farming and ritual sites. Göbekli Tepe is close to twelve thousand years old; Çatalhöyük and Alaca Höyük mark Neolithic Anatolia. Later Hittites, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans layered capitals on the same bridge between Asia and Europe.
Historians treat Turkey’s story as both Anatolia and Eastern Thrace—regions Rome absorbed in the second century BC that later formed the Byzantine core. Long before Turkic dynasties arrived, modern humans lived here from the late Paleolithic. Anatolian farmers differed genetically from those in Iran and the Jordan Valley and began migrating into Europe around nine thousand years ago. Troy’s earliest layers reach about 4500 BC; the Urfa Man statue, from roughly 9000 BC, is called the oldest known naturalistic life-sized human sculpture.
Written Anatolian history opens with Assyrian trade tablets from about 2000 BC at Kültepe. Hattian, Hurrian, Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic languages shared the plateau; Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European tongue. The Hittite kingdom, capital Hattusa, flourished roughly 1700–1200 BC beside Palaians and Luwians. After its collapse, Phrygia rose around 750 BC at Gordium and near modern Kayseri, sharing Anatolia with Neo-Hittite states and Urartu until Cimmerian attacks and Median–Scythian pressure remade the map after about 650 BC.
Achaemenid Persia divided Anatolia into satrapies; Darius I’s Royal Road linked Susa to Sardis. Ionian revolts sparked the Greco-Persian Wars; Alexander ended Persian rule between 334 and 330 BC. After Seleucid retreat under the Treaty of Apamea (188 BC), Rome tightened control, and Constantine made Constantinople his capital. Justinian’s empire peaked in the sixth century; Muslim conquests later stripped Egypt, Syria, and Africa. Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 ended Byzantium; Trebizond fell in 1461 and Theodoro in 1475. From Seljuk rule onward, Turkey’s medieval-to-modern arc runs through the Ottoman Empire into the Republic of the 1920s.
Source: History of Turkey
