Asia Minor fed Europe’s first farmers nine millennia ago
Anatolia, or Asia Minor, is the westernmost thrust of Asia and makes up most of modern Turkey, hemmed in by the Mediterranean, Aegean, Marmara and Black seas. Around 9,000 years ago its Neolithic farmers began moving into Europe, and their descendants came to dominate the continent as far as Iberia and Britain.
The name comes from Greek Anatolḗ, the east, literally the quarter where the sun rises, much as levant and orient grew from Latin verbs of rising. The oldest known name for any part of the peninsula is the Land of Hatti, first applied to the central homeland of the Hattians and later to the whole Hittite realm. Greeks first called it Asia, a label Rome gave its western province; after the Seljuks founded the Sultanate of Rûm in 1077, Rûm became another name, and by the twelfth century Europeans spoke of Turchia.
People lived here from the Paleolithic onward. Neolithic sites include Göbekli Tepe, Çayönü and Çatalhöyük, the last dated to about 7,000 BCE and regarded as the most advanced. Farming arrived from the neighbouring Fertile Crescent, and archaeogenetics now links its spread into Europe with migrating Anatolian farmers. Written history starts around 2000 BC with clay tablets from an Assyrian trading colony at Kültepe, and the Anatolian languages, the earliest recorded branch of Indo-European, have been spoken here since at least the nineteenth century BCE.
The Hattians, neither Indo-European nor Semitic, were slowly absorbed by speakers of Hittite, Luwian, Lydian and related tongues. Once seventh-century losses left Asia Minor as Byzantium's only eastern land, the empire created the Anatolic Theme, named from the same Greek word. Greek influence peaked and then waned in the Byzantine era, when wars with the Seljuks let Turkish newcomers gain a foothold. Turkification began in the late eleventh century and continued under the Ottomans until their dynasty collapsed after World War I.
Traditionally the peninsula ends at a loose line from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Black Sea, matching the Anatolian Plateau, with the Armenian Highlands beyond. After the Armenian genocide, the new Turkish government renamed Western Armenia as Eastern Anatolia, and the 1941 First Geography Congress fixed that region and Southeastern Anatolia among Turkey's seven. Historian Richard Hovannisian argued the renaming aimed to erase evidence of the Armenian presence. Mount Ararat, at 5,123 metres, is the region's highest summit.
Source: Anatolia
