History of Turkey

Antiquity

The Anatolian peninsula, comprising most of modern Turkey, is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world. Göbekli Tepe is the site of the oldest known man-made religious structure, a temple dating to 10,000 BC,[21] while Çatalhöyük is a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE. It is the largest and best-preserved Neolithic site found to date and in July 2012 was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The settlement of Troy started in the Neolithic Age and continued into the Iron Age. Through recorded history, ancient Anatolians have spoken Indo-European, Semitic and Kartvelian languages, as well as many languages of uncertain affiliation. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical center from which the Indo-European languages radiated.
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 ca. 2300 BC. Indo-European Hittites came to Anatolia and gradually absorbed the Hattians and Hurrians ca. 2000–1700 BC. The first major empire in the area was founded by the Hittites, from the eighteenth through the 13th century BC. The Assyrians conquered and settled parts of southeastern Turkey as early as 1950 BC until the year 612 BC.

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.[26] The most powerful of Phrygia's successor states were Lydia, Caria and Lycia. The Lydians and Lycians spoke languages that were fundamentally Indo-European, but both languages had acquired non-Indo-European elements prior to the Hittite and Hellenistic periods.
Starting around 1200 BC, the coast of Anatolia was heavily settled by Aeolian and Ionian Greeks. Numerous important cities were founded by these colonists, such as Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna (modern İzmir), and Byzantium (later Constantinople and Istanbul.) The first state that was called Armenia by neighboring peoples was the state of the Armenian Orontid dynasty, which included parts of eastern Turkey beginning in the 6th century BC.
Anatolia was conquered by the Persian Achaemenid Empire during the 6th and 5th centuries BC and later fell to Alexander the Great in 334 BC.Following Alexander's death in 323 BC, Anatolia was subsequently divided into a number of small Hellenistic kingdoms (including Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pergamum, and Pontus), all of which became part of the Roman Republic by the mid-1st century BC.
In 324, Constantine I chose Byzantium to be the new capital of the Roman Empire, renaming it New Rome (later Constantinople, modern Istanbul.) Following the death of Theodosius I in 395 and the permanent division of the Roman Empire between his two sons, Constantinople (Istanbul) became the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which would rule most of the territory of Turkey until the Late Middle Ages.

Etymology

The name of Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye) can be divided into two components: the ethnonym Türk and the abstract suffix –iye meaning "owner", "land of" or "related to" (derived from the Arabic suffix –iyya, which is similar to the Greek and Latin suffixes –ia). The first recorded use of the term "Türk" or "Türük" as an autonym is contained in the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks (Celestial Turks) of Central Asia (c. 8th century). The English name Turkey first appeared c. 1369.It is derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia, meaning "Land of the Turks", which was originally used by the Europeans to define the Seljuk-controlled parts of Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071; increasingly in common use starting with the Crusades. The Greek cognate of this name, Tourkia (Greek: Τουρκία) was originally used by the Byzantines to define medieval Hungary(since pre-Magyar Hungary was occupied by proto-Turkic and Turkic tribes, such as the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Kabars, Pechenegs and Cumans.) Similarly, the medieval Khazar Empire, a Turkic state on the northern shores of the Black and Caspian seas, was referred to as Tourkia (Land of the Turks) in Byzantine sources. However, the Byzantines later began using this name to define the Seljuk-controlled parts of Anatolia in the centuries that followed the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

Source:Wikipedia