Explore Ancient Anatolia

The Trojan War is one of history's most famous conflicts, a ten-year-long war waged over the beautiful Helen. For more than two thousand years this story has been a source of artistic inspiration. But is it true? In The Trojan War historian and classicist Barry Strauss explores the myth and the reality behind the war, from Homer's accounts in The Iliad and The Odyssey to Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of ancient Troy in the late nineteenth century to more recent excavations that have yielded intriguing clues to the story behind the fabled city.

The Anatolian is a fictional novel of ancient times in the Middle East, and tells the story of a young Hittite prince, Muwatallis, who is robbed of his birthright and flees ...

Luvian is the language of Anatolian hieroglyphic inscriptions and a close relative of Hittite. This book explores the Luvian ethnic history through sociolinguistic methods, with an emphasis on the interpretation of contacts between Luvian and its linguistic neighbors, such as Hittite, Hurrian, and Greek. It is concluded that Luvian was originally spoken in the central part of Anatolia. Subsequent Luvian migrations were connected with the expansion of the Hittite state, where Hittite was the socially dominant language, but the Luvian speakers were more numerous. The unstable balance between the Hittite and the Luvian speakers continued to shift in favor of the second group, to the point that the Hittite elites were fully bilingual in Luvian...

Book review: This is the first comprehensive study of the history of Asia Minor in antiquity to be written for nearly fifty years and the first attempt to treat Anatolian history as a whole over the millennium from the time of Alexander the Great to the peak of the Byzantine Empire.

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.