Ancient Anatolia
There is abundant archaeological evidence of a thriving neolithic culture
in Anatolia at least as early as the seventh millennium B.C. What may have
been the world's first urban settlement (dated ca. 6500 B.C.) has been
uncovered at Çatalhüyük in the Konya Ovasi (Konya Basin). Introduced early
in the third millennium B.C., metallurgy made possible a flourishing "copper
age" (ca. 2500-2000 B.C.) during which cultural patterns throughout the
region were remarkably uniform. The use of bronze weapons and implements was
widespread by 2000 B.C. Colonies of Assyrian merchants, who settled in
Anatolia during the copper age, provided metal for the military empires of
Mesopotamia, and their accounts and business correspondence are the earliest
written records found in Anatolia. From about 1500 B.C., southern Anatolia,
which had plentiful sources of ore and numerous furnace sites, developed as
a center of iron production. Two of the area's most celebrated
archaeological excavations are the sites at Troy and Hattusas (Bogazköy).
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 mound
called Hisarlik was identified as the site of ancient Troy in diggings begun
by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s. The first five
levels of the nine discovered at Hisarlik contained remains of cities from
the third millennium B.C. that controlled access to the shortest crossing of
the Dardanelles and that probably derived their prosperity from tolls.
Artifacts give evidence of 1,000 years of cultural continuity in the cities
built on these levels. A sharp break with the past occurred on the sixth
level, settled about 1900 B.C. by newcomers believed to have been related to
the early Greeks. Built after an earthquake devastated the previous city
about 1300 B.C., the seventh level was clearly the victim of sacking and
burning about 1150 B.C., and it is recognized as having been the Troy of
Homer's Iliad . Hisarlik subsequently was the site of a Greek city, Ilion,
and a Roman one, Ilium.
Hittites
Late in the third millennium B.C., waves of invaders speaking
Indo-European languages crossed the Caucasus Mountains into Anatolia. Among
them were the bronze-working, chariot-borne warriors who conquered and
settled the central plain. Building on older cultures, these invaders
borrowed even their name, the Hittites, from the indigenous Hatti whom they
had subjugated. They adopted the native Hattic deities 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 reputations
as merchants and statesmen who schooled the ancient Middle East in both
commerce and diplomacy. The Hittite Empire achieved the zenith of its
political power and cultural accomplishment in the fourteenth and thirteenth
centuries B.C., but the state collapsed after 1200 B.C. when the Phrygians,
clients of the Hittites, rebelled and burned Hattusas.
Phrygians and Lydians
The twelfth to ninth centuries B.C. were a time of turmoil throughout
Anatolia and the Aegean world. The destruction of Troy, Hattusas, and
numerous 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, and the appearance of the "sea peoples" who ravaged the
Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.
The first light to penetrate the dark age in Anatolia was lit by the very
Phrygians who had destroyed Hattusas. Architects, builders, and skilled
workers of iron, they had assimilated the Hittites' syncretic culture and
adopted many of their political institutions. Phrygian kings apparently
ruled most of western and central Anatolia in the ninth century B.C. from
their capital at Gordium (a site sixty kilometers southwest of modern
Ankara). Phrygian strength soon waned, however, and the kingdom was
overthrown in the seventh century B.C. by the Cimmerians, a nomadic people
who had been pursued over the Caucasus into Anatolia by the Scythians.
Order was restored in Anatolia by the Lydians, a Thracian warrior caste
who dominated the indigenous peasantry and derived their great wealth from
alluvial gold found in the tributaries of the Hermus River (Gediz Nehri).
From their court at Sardis, such Lydian kings as Croesus controlled western
Anatolia until their kingdom fell to the Persians in 546 B.C.
Greeks
The Aegean coast of Anatolia was an integral part of a Minoan-Mycenean
civilization (ca. 2600-1200 B.C.) that drew its cultural impulses from
Crete. During the Aegean region's so-called Dark Age (ca. 1050-800 B.C.),
Ionian Greek refugees fled across the sea to Anatolia, then under Lydian
rule, to escape the onslaught of the Dorians. Many more cities were founded
along the Anatolian coast during the great period of Greek expansion after
the eighth century B.C. One among them was Byzantium, a distant colony
established on the Bosporus by the city-state of Megara. Despite endemic
political unrest, the cities founded by the Ionians and subsequent Greek
settlers prospered from commerce with Phrygia and Lydia, grew in size and
number, and generated a renaissance that put Ionia in the cultural vanguard
of the Hellenic world.
At first the Greeks welcomed the Persians, grateful to be freed from
Lydian control. But when the Persians began to impose unpopular tyrants on
the city-states, the Greeks rebelled and called on their kinsmen in Greece
for aid. In 334 B.C., 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, incorporating them into an
empire that at his death in 323 B.C. stretched from the Nile to the Indus.
After Alexander died, control of Anatolia was contested by several of the
Macedonian generals among whom his empire was divided. By 280 B.C. one of
them, Seleucus Nicator, had made good his claim to an extensive kingdom that
included southern and western Anatolia and Thrace as well as Syria,
Mesopotamia, and, for a time, Persia. Under the Seleucid Dynasty, which
survived until 64 B.C., colonists were brought from Greece, and the process
of hellenization was extended among 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. Pergamum became independent in 262 B.C., during the Attalid
Dynasty, and won fame as the paragon of Hellenistic states. Noted for the
cleanliness of its streets and the splendor of its art, Pergamum, in
west-central Anatolia, derived its extraordinary wealth from trade in pitch,
parchment, and perfume, while slave labor produced a food surplus on
scientifically managed state farms. It was also a center of learning that
boasted a medical school and a library second in renown only to that of
Alexandria. But Pergamum was both despised and envied by the other Greek
states because of its alliance with
Rome and the Byzantine Empire
The last of the Attalid kings bequeathed Pergamum to his Roman allies
upon his death in 138 B.C. Rome organized this extensive territory under a
proconsul as the province of Asia. All of Anatolia except Armenia, which was
a Roman client-state, was integrated into the imperial system by A.D. 43.
After the accession of the Roman emperor Augustus (r. 27 B.C.-A.D. 14), and
for generations thereafter, the Anatolian provinces enjoyed prosperity and
security. The cities were administered by local councils and sent delegates
to provincial assemblies that advised the Roman governors. Their inhabitants
were citizens of a cosmopolitan world state, subject to a common legal
system and sharing a common Roman identity. Roman in allegiance and Greek in
culture, the region nonetheless retained its ethnic complexity.
In A.D. 285, the emperor Diocletian undertook the reorganization of the
Roman Empire, dividing jurisdiction between its Latin-speaking and
Greek-speaking halves. In 330 Diocletian's successor, Constantine,
established his capital at the Greek city of Byzantium, a "New Rome"
strategically situated on the European side of the Bosporus at its entrance
to the Sea of Marmara. For nearly twelve centuries the city, embellished and
renamed Constantinople, remained the capital of the Roman Empire--better
known in its continuous development in the East as the Byzantine Empire.
Christianity was introduced to Anatolia through the missionary activity
of Saint Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, and his
companions. Christians possibly even constituted a majority of the
population in most of Anatolia by the time Christianity was granted official
toleration under the Edict of Milan in A.D. 313. Before the end of the
fourth century, a patriarchate was established in Constantinople with
ecclesiastical jurisdiction over much of the Greek East. The basilica of
Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), whose construction in Constantinople was ordered
by Emperor Justinian in 532, became the spiritual focus of Greek
Christendom.
Although Greek in language and culture, the Byzantine Empire was
thoroughly Roman in its laws and administration. The emperor's
Greek-speaking subjects, conscious of their imperial vocation, called
themselves romaioi --Romans. Almost until the end of its long history, the
Byzantine Empire was seen as ecumenical--intended to encompass all Christian
peoples--rather than as a specifically Greek state.
In the early seventh century, the emperor in Constantinople presided over
a realm that included not only Greece and Anatolia but Syria, Egypt, Sicily,
most of Italy, and the Balkans, with outposts across North Africa as far as
Morocco. Anatolia was the most productive part of this extensive empire and
was also the principal reservoir of manpower for its defense. With the loss
of Syria to Muslim conquest in the seventh century, Anatolia became the
frontier as well as the heartland of the empire. The military demands
imposed on the Byzantine state to police its provinces and defend its
frontiers were enormous, but despite the gradual contraction of the empire
and frequent political unrest, Byzantine forces generally remained strong
until the eleventh century.
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