Prehistory of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace

Prehistory of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace
Main articles: Prehistory of Anatolia and Prehistory of Southeastern Europe
See also: Ancient Anatolians, Ancient kingdoms of Anatolia, and Thracians

Some henges at Göbekli Tepe were erected as far back as 9600 BC, predating those of Stonehenge, England, by over seven millennia.[32]

The Sphinx Gate in Hattusa (Hittite: 𒌷𒄩𒀜𒌅𒊭 Ḫattuša), capital of the Hittite Empire. The city’s history dates back to the 6th millennium BC.[33]
The Anatolian peninsula, comprising most 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.[12] Many of these peoples spoke the Anatolian languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family:[34] and, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical centre from which the Indo-European languages radiated.[35] The European part of Turkey, called Eastern Thrace, has also been inhabited since at least forty thousand years ago, and is known to have been in the Neolithic era by about 6000 BC.[13]

Göbekli Tepe is the site of the oldest known man-made religious structure, a temple dating to circa 10,000 BC,[32] while Çatalhöyük is a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC. It is the largest and best-preserved Neolithic site found to date and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.[36] The settlement of Troy started in the Neolithic Age and continued into the Iron Age.[37]

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,[38] although they have remained a minority in the region, namely in Hakkari, Şırnak and Mardin.[39]

Urartu re-emerged in Assyrian inscriptions in the 9th century BC as a powerful northern rival of Assyria.[40] 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.[41] Starting from 714 BC, Urartu shared the same fate and dissolved in 590 BC,[42] when it was conquered by the Medes. The most powerful of Phrygia’s successor states were Lydia, Caria and Lycia.