Anatolia
Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean Sea to the west, the Turkish Straits to the northwest, and the Black Sea to the north. The eastern and southeastern limits have been expanded either to the entirety of Asiatic Turkey or to an imprecise line from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Alexandretta. Topographically, the Sea of Marmara connects the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and separates Anatolia from Thrace in Southeast Europe.
During the Neolithic period, Anatolia was an early center for the development of farming after it originated in the adjacent Fertile Crescent. Beginning around 9,000 years ago, there was a major migration of Anatolian neolithic farmers into Europe, with their descendants coming to dominate the continent as far west as the Iberian Peninsula and Ireland, Scotland, and other Celtic regions based in the British Isles, including the Isle of Man.
The earliest recorded inhabitants of Anatolia, such as the Hattians, who were neither Indo-European nor Semitic, were gradually absorbed by the incoming Indo-European Anatolian peoples, who spoke the now-extinct Anatolian languages. The major Anatolian languages included Hittite, Luwian, and Lydian; other local languages, albeit poorly attested, included Phrygian and Mysian. The Hurro-Urartian languages were spoken throughout Mitanni in the southeast, while Galatian, a Celtic language, was spoken throughout Galatia in the central peninsula. Among the other peoples who established a significant presence in ancient Anatolia were the Galatians, the Hurrians, the Assyrians, the Armenians, the Hattians, and the Cimmerians, as well as some of the ancient Greek tribes, including the Ionians, the Dorians, and the Aeolians. In the era of classical antiquity, the Anatolian languages were largely replaced by the Greek language, which came to dominate a large region during the Hellenistic period and the Roman period.
The Byzantine period saw the height and eventual decline of Greek influence throughout the peninsula as the Byzantine–Seljuk wars enabled the incoming Seljuk Turks to establish a foothold in the region. Thus, the process of Anatolia's Turkification began under the Seljuk Empire in the late 11th century and continued under the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century, when the Ottoman dynasty collapsed in the aftermath of World War I. Between 1894 and 1924, millions of non-Turkic peoples and Christians, especially Greeks and Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Turkish authorities or expelled from the bulk of the area of modern-day Turkey. Nonetheless, a variety of non-Turkic languages continue to be spoken by ethnic minorities in Anatolia today, including Arabic, Kurdish, Neo-Aramaic, Armenian, the North Caucasian languages, Laz, Georgian, and Greek.
Geography
Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to an indefinite line running from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Black Sea, coterminous with the Anatolian Plateau. This traditional geographical definition is used, for example, in the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary. Under this definition, Anatolia is bounded to the east by the Armenian Highlands, and the Euphrates before that river bends to the southeast to enter Mesopotamia. To the southeast, it is bounded by the ranges that separate it from the Orontes valley in Syria and the Mesopotamian plain.Following the Armenian genocide, Western Armenia was renamed the Eastern Anatolia region by the newly established Turkish government. In 1941, with the First Geography Congress which divided Turkey into seven geographical regions based on differences in climate and landscape, the eastern provinces of Turkey were placed into the Eastern Anatolia region, which largely corresponds to the historical region of Western Armenia. Vazken Davidian terms the expanded use of "Anatolia" to apply to territory in eastern Turkey that was formerly referred to as Armenia an "ahistorical imposition" and notes that a growing body of literature is uncomfortable with referring to the Ottoman East as "Eastern Anatolia".
The highest mountain in the Eastern Anatolia region is Mount Ararat. The Euphrates, Aras, Karasu and Murat rivers connect the Armenian Highlands to the South Caucasus and the Upper Euphrates Valley. Along with the Çoruh, these rivers are the longest in the Eastern Anatolia region.
Etymology
The English-language name Anatolia derives from the Greek Ἀνατολή meaning "the East" and designating eastern regions in general. The Greek word refers to the direction where the sun rises, coming from ἀνατέλλω anatello ' rise up', comparable to terms in other languages such as "levant" from Latin levo 'to rise', "orient" from Latin orior 'to arise, to originate', Hebrew מִזְרָח mizraḥ 'east' from זָרַח zaraḥ 'to rise, to shine', Aramaic מִדְנָח midnaḥ from דְּנַח denaḥ 'to rise, to shine'.The use of Anatolian designations has varied over time, perhaps originally referring to the Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian colonies situated along the eastern coasts of the Aegean Sea, but also encompassing eastern regions in general. Such use of Anatolian designations was employed during the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian, who created the Diocese of the East, known in Greek as the Eastern Diocese, but completely unrelated to the regions of Asia Minor. In their widest territorial scope, Anatolian designations were employed during the reign of Roman Emperor Constantine I, who created the Praetorian prefecture of the East, known in Greek as the Eastern Prefecture, encompassing all eastern regions of the Late Roman Empire and spanning from Thrace to Egypt.
Only after the loss of other eastern regions during the 7th century and the reduction of Byzantine eastern domains to Asia Minor, that region became the only remaining part of the Byzantine East, and thus commonly referred to as the Eastern part of the Empire. At the same time, the Anatolic Theme was created, as a province covering the western and central parts of Turkey's present-day Central Anatolia Region, centered around Iconium, but ruled from the city of Amorium.
The Latinized form "Anatolia", with its -ia ending, is probably a Medieval Latin innovation. The modern Turkish form Anadolu derives directly from the Greek name Ἀνατολή. The Russian male name Anatoly, the French Anatole and plain Anatol, all stemming from saints Anatolius of Laodicea and Anatolius of Constantinople, share the same linguistic origin.
Names
The oldest known name for any region within Anatolia is related to its central area, known as the "Land of Hatti" – a designation that was initially used for the land of ancient Hattians, but later became the most common name for the entire territory under the rule of ancient Hittites.The first recorded name the Greeks used for the Anatolian peninsula, though not particularly popular at the time, was Ἀσία, perhaps from an Akkadian expression for the "sunrise" or possibly echoing the name of the Assuwa league in western Anatolia. The Romans used it as the name of their province, comprising the west of the peninsula plus the nearby Aegean Islands. As the name "Asia" broadened its scope to apply to the vaster region east of the Mediterranean, some Greeks in Late Antiquity came to use the name Asia Minor, meaning "Lesser Asia" to refer to present-day Anatolia, whereas the administration of the Empire preferred the description Ἀνατολή.
The endonym Ῥωμανία was understood as another name for the province by the invading Seljuq Turks, who founded a Sultanate of Rûm in 1077. Thus Rûm became another name for Anatolia. By the 12th century Europeans had started referring to Anatolia as Turchia.
During the era of the Ottoman Empire, many mapmakers referred to the mountainous plateau in eastern Anatolia as Armenia. Other contemporary sources called the same area Kurdistan. Geographers have used East Anatolian plateau, Armenian plateau and the Iranian plateau to refer to the region; the former two largely overlap. While a standard definition of Anatolia refers to the entire Asian side of Turkey, according to archaeologist Lori Khatchadourian, this difference in terminology "primarily result from the shifting political fortunes and cultural trajectories of the region since the nineteenth century".
Turkey's First Geography Congress in 1941 created two geographical regions of Turkey to the east of the Gulf of Iskenderun-Black Sea line, the Eastern Anatolia region and the Southeastern Anatolia region, the former largely corresponding to the western part of the Armenian Highlands, the latter to the northern part of the Mesopotamian plain. According to Richard Hovannisian, this changing of toponyms was "necessary to obscure all evidence" of the Armenian presence as part of the policy of Armenian genocide denial embarked upon by the newly established Turkish government and what Hovannisian calls its "foreign collaborators".
History
Prehistoric Anatolia
Human habitation in Anatolia dates back to the Paleolithic. Neolithic settlements include Çatalhöyük, Çayönü, Nevali Cori, Aşıklı Höyük, Boncuklu Höyük, Hacilar, Göbekli Tepe, Norşuntepe, Köşk Höyük, and Yumuktepe. Çatalhöyük is considered the most advanced of these. Recent advances in archaeogenetics have confirmed that the spread of agriculture from the Middle East to Europe was strongly correlated with the migration of early farmers from Anatolia about 9,000 years ago, and was not just a cultural exchange. Anatolian Neolithic farmers derived most of their ancestry from local Anatolian hunter-gatherers, suggesting that agriculture was adopted in site by these hunter-gatherers and not spread by demic diffusion into the region. Anatolian-derived Neolithic Farmers would subsequently spread across Europe, as far west as the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles, as well as to the Maghreb. Most modern Europeans derive a significant part of their ancestry from these Neolithic Anatolian farmers. Levantines also have significant Neolithic Anatolian farmer ancestry from post-Bronze Age migrations. About 6,500 years ago and thereafter, Anatolians became more genetically homogeneous due to eastern inflow. Earlier forms of Anatolian and non–Indo-European languages such as Hattic and Hurrian were likely spoken by migrants and locals participating in this great mixture. Steppe ancestry is also absent in Anatolians until the Bronze Age.Neolithic Anatolia has been proposed as the homeland of the Indo-European language family, although linguists tend to favor a later origin in the steppes north of the Black Sea. However, it is clear that the Anatolian languages, the earliest attested branch of Indo-European, have been spoken in Anatolia since at least the 19th century BCE.