Explore Ancient Anatolia

In Greek mythology, Midas is popularly remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold: the Midas touch. In alchemy, the transmutation of an object into gold is known as chrysopoeia. Midas was king of Pessinus, a city of Phrygia, who as a child was adopted by the king Gordias and Cybele, the goddess whose consort he was, and who by some accounts was the goddess-mother of Midas himself. Some accounts place the youth of Midas in Macedonian Bermion In Mygdonia Midas was known for his garden of roses: Herodotus remarks on the settlement of the ancient kings of Macedon on the slopes of Mount Bermion "the place called the garden of Midas son of Gordias, where roses grow of themselves, each bearing sixty blossoms and of surpassing fragrance. In this garden, according to the Macedonian story, Silenos was taken captive." According to Iliad (v.860), he had one son, Lityerses, the demonic reaper of men; but in some variations of the myth he had a daughter, Zoë or ...

Juliopolis was a titular see in the province of Bithynia Secunda, suffragan of Nicaea. The city was founded under the Emperor Augustus by a robber chieftain named Cleon, who was a native of the region; previously it had been called Gordoucome. Its ruins are about six miles SSE of Çayırhan, and about three miles north of the Sangarius River (Sakarya) near Ankara. According to ancient authors (Herodotus, Xenophon, Strabo, etc.), the Bithynians were an immigrant Thracian tribe. The existence of a tribe called Thyni in Thrace is well established, and the two cognate tribes of the Thyni and Bithyni appear to have settled simultaneously in the adjoining parts of Asia, where they expelled or subdued the Mysians, Caucones and other minor tribes, the Mariandyni maintaining themselves in the northeast. Herodotus mentions that the tribe Thyni and Bithyni as existing side by side; but ultimately the latter must have become the more important, as they gave their name to the country. They were inc...

Ancient Galatia was an area in the highlands of central Anatolia in modern Turkey. Galatia was bounded on the north by Bithynia and Paphlagonia, on the east by Pontus, on the south by Lycaonia and Cappadocia, and on the west by the remainder of Phrygia, the eastern part of which the Gauls had invaded. The modern capital of Turkey, Ankara (ancient Ancyra), was also the capital of ancient Galatia.

Photo: Hittite god-king Ura-Tarhunzas, (Talmi-Teshub) statue in limestone, from Aslantepe Malatya (Lions’ Hill), eighth century BC, in the museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey.

The oldest testimony of chariot warfare in the Ancient Near East is the Old Hittite Anitta text (18th century BC), mentioning 40 teams of horses at the siege of Salatiwara.