Ten thousand years of history before the Romans: the first monuments, the first written records, a Bronze Age empire, the kingdoms of Midas and Croesus, and the Greek cities of the coast.
Last reviewed on 27 September 2026.
Anatolia — the peninsula that makes up most of modern Türkiye — has one of the densest archaeological records on earth. Long before the Byzantine and Ottoman centuries that dominate most visitors' picture of Turkey, it produced some of the first monuments and towns, an empire that dealt with Egypt as an equal, and some of the earliest coins. This page takes those civilisations in order, from the Neolithic to Alexander, and says where to see each one today.
| Period / people | Approximate dates | Key sites today |
|---|---|---|
| Early Neolithic monuments | c. 9600–8000 BC | Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe (Şanlıurfa) |
| Neolithic towns | c. 7100–6000 BC | Çatalhöyük (Konya) |
| Assyrian trading colonies | c. 20th–18th centuries BC | Kültepe / Kanesh (Kayseri) |
| Hittites | c. 1650–1180 BC | Hattusa, Yazılıkaya, Alacahöyük (Çorum) |
| Neo-Hittite states | c. 1180–700 BC | Arslantepe (Malatya), Karatepe-Aslantaş (Osmaniye) |
| Urartu | c. 9th–6th centuries BC | Van Fortress, Çavuştepe (Van) |
| Phrygians | c. 9th–7th centuries BC (independent) | Gordion (Ankara), Midas City (Eskişehir) |
| Lydians | c. 7th century–546 BC | Sardis (Manisa) |
| Ionian and other Greek cities | c. 11th century BC onwards | Miletus, Priene, Ephesus, Teos |
| Achaemenid Persian rule | 546–334 BC | Sardis, Halicarnassus (Bodrum) |
Dates before the first millennium BC are approximate and regularly revised.
The story now begins in the southeast, on a limestone ridge near Şanlıurfa. Göbekli Tepe consists of circular and oval enclosures ringed with T-shaped stone pillars, some over five metres tall, carved with foxes, boars, snakes, vultures and, on the central pillars, human arms and belts that show the pillars stood for stylised figures. The oldest enclosures date to roughly 9600 BC — before pottery, metal or, as far as anyone can tell, fully domesticated crops. Excavations begun by Klaus Schmidt in 1995 overturned the assumption that farming came first and monuments later; related sites nearby, notably Karahan Tepe, are now being dug under the "Taş Tepeler" (Stone Hills) project. Göbekli Tepe has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2018; many finds are displayed in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum.
Two to three millennia later, on the Konya plain, Çatalhöyük was a dense settlement of mud-brick houses built wall to wall without streets; people moved across the roofs and entered their homes by ladder. It was occupied from roughly 7100 to 6000 BC, and its population is usually estimated in the low thousands. Houses had plastered platforms with burials beneath, bull horns set into benches and walls, and wall paintings. James Mellaart excavated in the 1960s; Ian Hodder's team from 1993 to 2017. The site is on the UNESCO list (2012) and can be visited from Konya, but the shelters show foundations rather than spectacle. The famous seated female figure flanked by felines is in Ankara.
Anatolia enters written history through trade. At Kültepe, about 20 km northeast of Kayseri, the ancient city of Kanesh had a commercial quarter called a kārum, where merchants from the city of Assur in northern Mesopotamia lived and traded, mainly between about 1950 and 1750 BC. Donkey caravans brought tin (needed for bronze) and textiles into Anatolia and carried silver and gold back to Assur. The merchants kept their business letters, contracts and family correspondence on clay tablets in Old Assyrian cuneiform, and more than 20,000 of them have been excavated — the earliest large body of writing from Anatolia.
They also preserve local names and loanwords in early Hittite — the earliest attested Indo-European language anywhere. The Hittites later called their own language nešili, "the language of Nesa", which is another name for Kanesh. The site itself shows foundations; the finds are in Kayseri and Ankara.
The Hittite kingdom emerged in central Anatolia around 1650 BC, when a king who took the name Hattusili ("the man of Hattusa") made the city of Hattusa his capital. His successor Mursili I sacked Babylon around 1595 BC. The kingdom became a true great power in the 14th and 13th centuries BC under kings such as Suppiluliuma I, controlling much of Anatolia and northern Syria and corresponding on equal terms with Egypt, Babylon and Assyria.
Rivalry with Egypt over Syria came to a head at the Battle of Kadesh, fought on the Orontes River around 1274 BC between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and Ramesses II. Ramesses advertised it on his temple walls as a victory; in practice it was at best a draw, and the Hittites kept the region. Some fifteen years later (around 1259 BC) Hattusili III and Ramesses II concluded a formal treaty of peace, mutual defence and the return of fugitives. It survives in Egyptian inscriptions and in Akkadian on clay tablets from Hattusa, and it is often described as the oldest surviving peace treaty for which both parties' versions are preserved. One of the tablets is displayed in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and a copy hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Hattusa lies beside the village of Boğazkale in Çorum province, roughly two and a half to three hours' drive east of Ankara, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986. The large, hilly site is best seen by car along the circuit road: the Great Temple, the Lion Gate, the King's Gate (the relief is a copy; the original is in Ankara), the Sphinx Gate above the Yerkapı tunnel, and a reconstructed stretch of mud-brick wall. Its archives, found from 1906, yielded thousands of tablets; Bedřich Hrozný showed in 1915 that Hittite was Indo-European.
About two kilometres away, Yazılıkaya is an open-air rock sanctuary with two natural chambers. The larger carries a procession of gods and goddesses converging on the storm god Teshub and the sun goddess Hebat; the smaller has a relief of King Tudhaliya IV embraced by his protective god and the strange "sword god". The reliefs are shallow, so low morning or afternoon light helps. Nearby Alacahöyük, with its sphinx gate, rounds off the day; its Early Bronze Age tomb finds are in Ankara.
The Hittite state collapsed around 1180 BC, part of the wider Late Bronze Age collapse that also brought down Mycenaean Greece and Ugarit; drought, internal conflict and population movements are all cited, and their weight is debated. In southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria, Neo-Hittite or Syro-Hittite kingdoms such as Carchemish and Melid (Arslantepe near Malatya, a UNESCO site since 2021) carried the royal traditions on, writing in hieroglyphic Luwian. At Karatepe-Aslantaş in Osmaniye province, a bilingual Luwian–Phoenician inscription of the 8th century BC was key to deciphering that script.
In the early first millennium BC the Phrygians dominated the central plateau from their capital, Gordion, on the Sakarya River near Polatlı, west of Ankara. Gordion was added to the UNESCO list in 2023. Its most striking monument is Tumulus MM, an earth mound about 50 metres high covering a timber burial chamber. Excavators tunnelled in in 1957 and found an intact burial with bronze vessels and inlaid wooden furniture. Tree-ring dating places the chamber around 740 BC, which is probably too early for the famous Midas; many scholars now think it belonged to his predecessor, possibly his father. The chamber can be entered through the modern tunnel, and the site museum stands opposite.
Midas himself was real: Assyrian records of the late 8th century BC mention "Mita of Mushki", generally identified with him. Greek legend gave him the golden touch. The Phrygian kingdom was badly damaged by Cimmerian invaders in the early 7th century BC, after which Phrygia fell under Lydian and then Persian control. The rock-cut "Midas Monument" at Midas City (Yazılıkaya in Eskişehir province, not to be confused with the Hittite Yazılıkaya) is a carved façade naming Midas, probably a shrine to the mother goddess Matar rather than a tomb. Gordion was also where, in 333 BC, Alexander the Great was said to have cut the Gordian knot.
Around Lake Van in the east, the kingdom of Urartu rose in the 9th century BC and for two centuries was Assyria's most serious northern rival. Its capital, Tushpa, is the long limestone rock now called Van Fortress (Van Kalesi), with royal rock-cut tombs and cuneiform inscriptions carved into the cliff. Urartian kings were formidable engineers: the canal built under King Menua, running some 50 km to bring water to the Van plain, is still partly in use. Their language, related to Hurrian, was written in adapted Assyrian cuneiform. Urartu declined in the 7th century BC and disappeared by the early 6th, under pressure from Scythians, Medes and others. Van Fortress, the hilltop fortress of Çavuştepe south of the city, and the Van Museum are the places to see Urartian remains; see Van.
In the west, the Lydians built a kingdom centred on Sardis (modern Sart, Manisa province), inland from İzmir. Under the Mermnad dynasty, founded by Gyges in the early 7th century BC, Lydia dominated western Anatolia. Its lasting contribution is money. The earliest known coins — lumps of electrum, a natural gold-silver alloy found in the Pactolus stream at Sardis, stamped with a lion's head — were produced in Lydia or its Ionian neighbours in the late 7th century BC. The next step, separate coins of relatively pure gold and silver, is traditionally credited to Croesus, although some numismatists now date these "Croeseids" slightly later, under Persian rule.
Croesus (reigned c. 560–546 BC) became a byword for wealth. Herodotus tells how Delphi assured him that crossing the Halys (Kızılırmak) would destroy a great empire — it was his own. Cyrus the Great captured Sardis in about 546 BC. At Sardis today you can see a later temple of Artemis, a Roman bath-gymnasium and a large ancient synagogue alongside Lydian remains. North of the city, the cemetery of Bin Tepe ("a thousand mounds") holds Lydian royal tumuli, including the huge mound usually attributed to Croesus's father, Alyattes.
From about the 11th century BC Greek speakers settled the Aegean coast: Aeolians in the north, Ionians in the centre and Dorians in the south. The twelve cities of the Ionian League included Miletus, Priene, Ephesus, Teos, Colophon, Phocaea and Clazomenae, with the islands of Samos and Chios. At Miletus, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes attempted natural rather than mythological explanations of the world; Heraclitus worked at Ephesus; Herodotus, "the father of history", was born at Halicarnassus (Bodrum). The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, rebuilt after a fire in 356 BC, was counted among the Seven Wonders; see the Ephesus page for what survives.
Carians, Lycians and other Anatolian peoples with their own languages lived in the southwest, and Troy, near Çanakkale, spans the Bronze Age to Roman times; see Çanakkale and Troy.
After taking Sardis, the Achaemenid Persians ruled Anatolia through provincial governors (satraps), with Sardis as a key seat. Herodotus describes a Royal Road running from Sardis to Susa with staging posts along the way. The Ionian cities revolted in 499 BC; it ended with the sack of Miletus in 494 BC and helped provoke the Persian invasions of Greece. Persian rule continued, often through local dynasts. The best known is Mausolus of Caria, whose monumental tomb at Halicarnassus, completed after his death in 353 BC, gave the word "mausoleum" to the world and was another of the Seven Wonders. Only foundations remain in Bodrum; many sculptures are in the British Museum.
In 334 BC Alexander of Macedon crossed the Hellespont (the Dardanelles), defeated a Persian army at the Granicus River near modern Biga, and moved down the coast, besieging Miletus and Halicarnassus. He wintered in Gordion in 334–333 BC, where the knot story is set, and in late 333 BC defeated Darius III at Issus, near İskenderun in today's Hatay province. Anatolia then passed to his successors: the Seleucids, the Attalid kings of Pergamon, and smaller kingdoms such as Commagene, whose ruler built the colossal sanctuary on Mount Nemrut. In 133 BC the last Attalid king bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, and the long Roman and then Byzantine era began.
If you see one collection, make it the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, below the citadel. Housed in a restored Ottoman covered market and caravanserai, it is laid out chronologically: Palaeolithic and Neolithic (the Çatalhöyük wall paintings and figurines), Early Bronze Age (the Alacahöyük finds), the Assyrian colony period (Kültepe tablets and pottery), Hittite, Phrygian (the Gordion furniture) and Urartian galleries, with Neo-Hittite reliefs in the central hall. Allow at least two hours and check current opening times before you go.
The earliest monumental site is Göbekli Tepe, begun around 9600 BC, followed by Neolithic towns such as Çatalhöyük from around 7100 BC. The first written records come from the Assyrian merchant colony at Kültepe (Kanesh) near Kayseri, about 1950–1750 BC, and the first great Anatolian state was the Hittite kingdom from about 1650 BC.
The Hittite capital was Hattusa, beside the village of Boğazkale in Çorum province, roughly two and a half to three hours by road east of Ankara. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya is about two kilometres away.
The treaty between Hattusili III and Ramesses II, concluded around 1259 BC, is often called the oldest surviving peace treaty because both sides' versions are preserved: in Egyptian inscriptions and on Akkadian clay tablets from Hattusa. Older agreements existed, so the claim is best put as the earliest well-documented treaty of its kind. A tablet is in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
Yes. Assyrian records of the late 8th century BC mention a king called Mita of Mushki, generally identified with the Phrygian Midas who ruled from Gordion. The golden touch and donkey's ears are later Greek legends, and the great burial mound at Gordion probably belongs to his predecessor rather than to him.
The earliest known coins were made of electrum, a gold-silver alloy, in Lydia or neighbouring Ionia in the late 7th century BC. Croesus of Lydia is traditionally credited with the first separate gold and silver coins, although some specialists date those issues slightly later. Sardis, the Lydian capital, is near Salihli in Manisa province.
The Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara is the essential collection, arranged chronologically from the Palaeolithic through Çatalhöyük, the Hittites, the Phrygians and Urartu. The Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum and regional museums in Çorum, Kayseri and Van add important material.