The lands around the central Turkish plateau have historically "faced" two ways. The western and southern shores have been drawn to Greece and Europe. The mountain-ringed interior has been linked to Iran and Asia proper.
Neolithic Anatolians were among the first farmers and herders, dwelling in villages with sophisticated technology and organization. From the Sumerians to the south, they learned to write and build palaces and cities.
Beginning as invaders from the Balkans, the daring Indo-European people called the Hittites overran Anatolia's core with their war chariots and founded a dynasty that rivaled the Egypt of Ramses II.
Hittite kings became the first of many conquerors who would leave their mark on the land. Near their ritual capital of Hattušaš, they carved from the living rock a mighty open-air shrine to their thousands of gods. But shortly thereafter, Hattušaš was sacked and abandoned.
As the Hittites were uniting Anatolia, early Greeks (called Achaeans) were visiting its western reaches. From fortress-palaces at places like Mycenae and Pylos, Achaean warlords traded and raided along the shores of Asia Minor and, in time, would become the first Greeks to clash with the armies of a great king to the east.
The most enduring legacies from early Anatolia are The Iliad and The Odyssey (c. 750 B.C.). How do the siege of Troy and the exploits of Homer's warrior chieftains fit into the wider tale of imperial struggle and decline during the Greek Dark Age (1100–750 B.C.)?
From 1200 to 1000 B.C., migrations reshaped Anatolia. Phrygians came from the Balkans, only to be overcome by Cimmerian nomads (c. 700 B.C.). In the West, Hittite provincials founded trade-rich Lydia, whose last king was Croesus.
From 750 B.C. the Greeks distinguished themselves with the polis, a city-state based on citizen rule and destined to influence the world. By 500 B.C., Athens had devised the first democratic constitution, with all adult male citizens forming the sovereign assembly.
The Archaic Age (750-480 B.C.), known in glimpses, remains one of history's most creative periods. Its poets, philosophers, sculptors, and architects gave birth to the mind of the West. At its forefront were the Greek trading cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor and the nearby islands.
In 546 B.C., Cyrus the Great of Persia made Anatolia part of his world empire. Anatolian grandees took to Persian ways, and life across Asia Minor soon bore a Persian stamp. Only the Ionian Greeks stood apart. When they rebelled against their Persian-sponsored local tyrants in 499 B.C., war flamed forth between the Greek city-states and the Great King.
As the 5th century B.C. closed, war among the Greeks left the Great King once again ruler of Ionia, but with a weakened empire. It seemed that Persian and native elites would carve out kingdoms, and that Ionia would again become the meeting place of East and West. But Alexander the Great had other ideas.
In eight years beginning in 334 B.C., Alexander and his Macedonians overran the Persian Empire, unexpectedly altering the course of Anatolian civilization by making Hellenism the leading cultural force in Asia Minor for the next 15 centuries.
Alexander's successor dynasts promoted Greek culture. The Attalid kings turned their fortress city of Pergamum into a showcase of Hellenic arts and learning that the Romans admired. Elites poured their wealth into public display and buildings, and cities knew themselves to be part of a wider Hellenic world.
Pompey charged the Hellenistic cities with administering the Roman provincial system in the parts of Asia Minor the legions conquered. Thanks to his reforms, these rich cities paid for the civil wars (48–31 B.C.) that destroyed the Republic and made the brilliant politician Octavian Rome's first emperor.
Under the pax Romana, Hellenic cities of Anatolia attained their greatest prosperity and cultural accomplishment. Polished Hellenic aristocrats sought Roman citizenship and, more than any other provincials, imposed the notion that an emperor should act not as a ruler of subjects but as a leader of free men.
In the Hellenistic and Roman ages, the native gods of Anatolia assumed Hellenic guises. The record of religious life at this time is at odds with the common opinion that the public worship of civic gods (including emperors) declined before enthusiastic, irrational mystery cults.
Paul preached in the cities of Anatolia, converting Hellenized Jews and Judaized pagans. In A.D. 250, Christians were still a tiny minority, but with impressive institutions developed in Anatolia. When the convert Emperor Constantine (r. 306–337) summoned the First Ecumenical Council to Nicaea in 325, a momentous new chapter in religious history opened.
After a century of crisis in the Roman world, Constantine unified it and created an imperial church. By 500, Anatolia had undergone yet another cultural and religious transformation into a Christian land. Anatolia had passed over into the Byzantine age.
When Constantine dedicated his New Rome on the site of an old Greek colony on the European side of the Bosporus, he was founding a capital that would stand as the bastion of Roman government and classical learning under great emperors such as Justinian.
The restored Roman Empire of Justinian and after faced many foes, including the new armies of Islam. Urbane classical life yielded to a martial society. Fortress cities rose in the interior. Tenacious Byzantine defense broke the Arabic advance, and Anatolia prospered for a time.
Macedonian emperors revived patronage of the arts and letters at Constantinople, and this cultural rebirth was echoed across Anatolia in the 10th and 11th centuries. By 950, nobles were hiring first-class artists who painted in naturalistic styles that looked back to classical models and would influence the Italian Renaissance.
For a century, the fate of Anatolia lay poised between Byzantines and Seljuk Turks. Though damaged by Crusader depredations, the Byzantines struggled to stem the Turkish tide. As the 13th century opened, the outlines of a new Muslim Turkish civilization began to appear in Anatolia.
The sultans sponsored a new, vital Muslim society that once again reshaped the religious landscape of Anatolia, this time with mosques and minarets. The Mongol attacks of the 1240s, ironically, would help make possible the rise of a new Turkish Muslim dynasty, the Ottomans.
The Ottomans forged the last great Mediterranean empire, ruled from a rebuilt Constantinople. Suleiman the Magnificent's failure to capture Vienna (1529) checked Ottoman expansion, but Ottoman military power remained formidable for centuries.