Explore Ancient Anatolia

We are on a mound, in the ruins of a Bronze Age palace, watching the magnificent Mt. Hasandag at sunset thru the ruined windows of the palace, burned down to earth, mud bricks fired to ceramic, walls molten down by a violent fire. We are in a time and place lost and forgotten through ages, covered with dust and earth, at the edge of Cappadocia, on the Konya Plain. We are in a place at the beginning of the period of Assyrian Trade Colonies as well as the Middle Bronze Age and the beginning of written history in Anatolia.

Isauria, in ancient geography, is a rugged isolated district in the interior of South Asia Minor, of very different extent at different periods, but generally covering much of what is now Konya/Bozkir province of Turkey, or the core of the Taurus Mountains. It derives its name from the contentious Isaurian tribe and twin settlements Isaura Palaea (Old Isaura) and Isaura Nea (New Isaura). Isaurian marauders were fiercely independent mountain people who created havoc in neighboring districts under Macedonian and Roman occupations.

3rd Century Roman sarcophagus of Sidamara at Archaeology Museum of Konya.

New site to reveal information about nomadic life ANKARA - Turkish Daily News Wednesday, August 30, 2006 New settlement discovered in Konya dating back 11,000 years. An excavation team led by British archeologist Douglas Baird has found a settlement occupied by a nomadic tribe 11,000 years ago in the Karatay district of Konya. The occupants of Boncuklu Höyük, or literally the “Beaded Mound,” are thought to be ancestors of the people of Çatalhöyük, a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia. The deepest layers of the mound are thought to date from around 7,500 BC. (To give a timescale, remember that Stonehenge, a Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monument located near Amesbury in the English county of Wiltshire, about 8 miles north of Salisbury, was erected between 2500 BC and 2000 BC although the surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC.)

Çatalhöyük was a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, dating from around 7500 BCE for the lowest layers. It is perhaps the largest and most sophisticated Neolithic site yet uncovered.