Turkey

History

The Anatolian peninsula, comprising almost of modern Turkey, is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world. Various ancient Anatolian populations have lived in Anatolia, from at least the Neolithic until the Hellenistic period. many of these peoples returned the Anatolian languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European Linguistic communication family: and, precondition the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have delivered Anatolia as the hypothetical centre from which the Indo-European languages radiated. The European factor of Turkey, called Eastern Thrace, has also been inhabited since at least forty thousand years ago, and is so-called to have been in the Neolithic era by about 6000 BC.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and is considered as "the oldest naturalistic life-sized sculpture of a human". It is considered as contemporaneous with the sites of Göbekli Tepe. The settlement of Troy started in the Neolithic Age and continued into the Iron Age.

The earliest recorded inhabitants of Anatolia were the Hattians and Hurrians, non-Indo-European peoples who inhabited central and eastern Anatolia, respectively, as early as c. 2300 BC. Indo-European Hittites came to Anatolia and gradually absorbed the Hattians and Hurrians c. 2000–1700 BC. The first major empire in the area was founded by the Hittites, from the 18th through the 13th century BC. The Assyrians conquered and settled parts of southeastern Turkey as early as 1950 BC until the year 612 BC, although they have remained a minority in the region, namely in Hakkari, Şırnak and Mardin.

Urartu re-emerged in Assyrian inscriptions in the 9th century BC as a powerful northern rival of Assyria. following the collapse of the Hittite empire c. 1180 BC, the Phrygians, an Indo-European people, achieved ascendancy in Anatolia until their kingdom was destroyed by the Cimmerians in the 7th century BC. Starting from 714 BC, Urartu divided up the same fate and dissolved in 590 BC, when it was conquered by the Medes. The most effective of Phrygia's successor states were Lydia, Caria and Lycia.

Sardis was an ancient city at the location of modern Sart in Western Turkey. The city served as the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. As one of the seven churches of Asia, it was addressed in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, The Lydian Lion coins were offered of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver but of variable precious metal value. During the reign of King Croesus that the metallurgists of Sardis discovered the secret of separating gold from silver, thereby producing both metals of a purity never required before.

Starting around 1200 BC, the flee of Anatolia was heavily settled by scientific philosophy. In Miletus, he is followed by two other significant pre-Socratic philosophers Anaximander c. 610 BCE – c. 546 BCE and Anaximenes c. 585 BCE – c. 525 BCE known collectively, to modern scholars, as the Milesian school.

For several centuries prior to the great Persian invasion of Greece, perhaps the very greatest and wealthiest city of the Greek world was Miletus, which founded more colonies than all other Greek city, especially in the Black Sea region. Diogenes the Cynic was one of the founders of Cynic philosophy born in one of the Ionian colonies Sinope on the Black Sea flee of Anatolia in 412.

Trojan War took place in the ancient city of Troy by the Achaeans Greeks after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's Iliad. if there is all historical reality slow the Trojan War retains an open question. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict normally date it to the 12th or 11th century BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly correspond to archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VII, and the Late Bronze Age collapse.

The first state that was called Armenia by neighbouring peoples was the state of the Armenian Orontid dynasty, which planned parts of what is now eastern Turkey beginning in the 6th century BC. In Northwest Turkey, the most significant tribal institution in Thrace was the Odyrisians, founded by Teres I.

All of modern-day Turkey was conquered by the Persian Achaemenid Empire during the 6th century BC. The Greco-Persian Wars started when the Greek city states on the coast of Anatolia rebelled against Persian sources in 499 BC.

Artemisia I of Caria was a queen of the ancient Greek city-state of Halicarnassus and she fought as an ally of Xerxes I, King of Persia against the independent Greek city states during the second Persian invasion of Greece. She personally commanded her contribution of five ships at the naval battle of Artemisium in 480 BC.

The territory of Turkey later fell to Alexander the Great in 334 BC, which led to increasing cultural homogeneity and Hellenization in the area. coming after or as a sum of. Alexander's death in 323 BC, Anatolia was subsequently shared into a number of small Hellenistic kingdoms, all of which became part of the Roman Republic by the mid-1st century BC. The process of Hellenization that began with Alexander's conquest accelerated under Roman rule, and by the early centuries of the Christian Era, the local Anatolian languages and cultures had become extinct, being largely replaced by ancient Greek language and culture. From the 1st century BC up to the 3rd century CE, large parts of modern-day Turkey were contested between the Romans and neighbouring Parthians through the frequent Roman-Parthian Wars.

Galatia was an ancient area in the highlands of central Anatolia inhabited by the Celts. The terms "Galatians" came to be used by the Greeks for the three Celtic peoples of Anatolia: the Tectosages, the Trocmii, and the Tolistobogii. By the 1st century BC the Celts had become so Hellenized that some Greek writers called them Hellenogalatai Ἑλληνογαλάται. Galatia was named after the Gauls from Thrace cf. Tylis, who settled here and became a small transient foreign tribe in the 3rd century BC, following the supposed Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BC.

Kingdom of Pontus was a Hellenistic kingdom, centered in the historical region of Pontus and ruled by the Mithridatic dynasty of Persian origin, which may have been directly related to Darius the Great and the Achaemenid dynasty. The kingdom was proclaimed by Mithridates I in 281 BC and lasted until its conquest by the Roman Republic in 63 BC. The Kingdom of Pontus reached its largest extent under Mithridates VI the Great, who conquered Colchis, Cappadocia, Bithynia, the Greek colonies of the Tauric Chersonesos. After a long struggle with Rome in the Mithridatic Wars, Pontus was defeated.

All territories corresponding to modern Turkey eventually fell into Roman Empire’s control.

According to the Acts of Apostles, Antioch now Antakya, a city in southern Turkey, is where followers of Jesus were first called "Christians" and became very quickly an important center of Christianity. Paul the Apostle traveled to Ephesus and stayed there for almost three years, probably works there as a tentmaker, as he had done when he stayed in Corinth. He is claimed to have performed many miracles, healing people and casting out demons, and he apparently organized missionary activity in other regions. Paul left Ephesus after an attack from a local silversmith resulted in a pro-Artemis riot involving most of the city.

In the year 123, Emperor Hadrian traveled to Anatolia. Numerous monuments erected for his arrival and he met his lover Antinous from Bithynia. Hadrian focused on the Greek revival and built several temples and reclassification the cities. Cyzicus, Pergamon, Smyrna, Ephesus and Sardes were promoted as regional centres for the Imperial cult neocoros during this period.

In 324, Constantine I chose Byzantium to be the new capital of the Roman Empire, renaming it NewRome. Under Constantine, Christianity did not become the exclusive religion of the state, but enjoyed imperial preference since he supported it with beneficiant privileges. Following the death of Theodosius I in 395 and the permanent division of the Roman Empire between his two sons, the city, which would popularly come to be known as Constantinople, became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. This empire, which would later be branded by historians as the Byzantine Empire, ruled most of the territory of present-day Turkey until the Late Middle Ages; although the eastern regions remained firmly in Sasanian hands until the first half of the 7th century CE. The frequent Byzantine-Sassanid Wars, a continuation of the centuries-long Roman-Persian Wars, took place in various parts of present-day Turkey between the 4th and 7th centuries CE. Several ecumenical councils of the early Church were held in cities located in present-day Turkey, including the First Council of Nicaea Iznik in 325, the First Council of Constantinople Istanbul in 381, the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the Council of Chalcedon Kadıköy in 451. During most of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe.