History

Introduction

Turkey has been described as “a new country in an old land^“. Present-day Turks descended from migrating Turkic tribes. These tribes likely roamed the Central Asian steppe and ventured through the mountains of eastern Turkey in the 6th century B.C.E. Known throughout most of history as Anatolia, Turkey was a bridge between Europe and Asia, controlled at various times by states and empires connected to both civilizations. The Hittite Empire (3000­2000 B.C.E), based east of Ankara, disintegrated when the Hittites were unable to repel the mysterious “Sea People,” possibly Achaeans from the Aegean Sea. Ancient Troy, the site of a ten-year siege by the Greeks, provided the setting for Homer’s epic, the Iliad. Alexander the Great, the warrior of Macedonia, gained control of Anatolia in the 4th century B.C.E. He was followed by Romans, whose colonies along Turkey’s western coast, Ephesus and Antioch, endured through the Christian and Byzantine eras. The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century C.E. introduced a force that was to shape European and Middle Eastern political geography for another 500 years.