natolia (Anadolu) has for the last 9000 years been the homeland of many distinct civilisations. They have Each left their trace on its terrain; they have all contributed to developments in world history - developments much to do with highly evolved urban order and economy.

The huge 13 - hectare neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük near Konya, dating from the seventh millennium BC, provides one of the earliest patterns of urbanisation and perhaps the highest level of continuous organic association of specific types of craftsmanship - in a word, culture. With its elaborate wall-paintings, Its sophisticated jewellery and weapons, its extensive agriculture and stock-breeding and its identification of property-ownership by use of seals. Çatalhöyük is striking as a pioneer of civilisation in Anatolia. Between 1800 and 1200 BC the Hittite civilisation, as it came to be known, directly affected its successors - the late Hittite principalities, the Urartians of eastern Anatolia, the Hellenes and the Etruscans. For example, Ancient Greek religion and mythology, no less than the Urartian, were strongly influenced by their Hittite Precursors.

By the 6C BC, western Anatolia emerged as the home of philosophy, with the appearance of Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, all natives of Miletus, who established Anatolia as the cultural heart of the World's landscape. Yet Anatolia was also to become the home of epic and myth, witness Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" centred on Troy and the return of Odysseus after the Trojan War, together with the much - fabled Midas (725-698 BC ) and Croesus ( 560-548 BC ), kings of Phrygia and Lydia.

The middle of the 4C BC heralded the thrust of the accumulated Anatolian civilisation of the classical period throughout the surrounding regions of the Near East and the Mediterranean until blocked by the advent of Rome over 200 years later. For the eastward conquest of Alexander the great (336 - 323 BC) prompted the mutual accommodation of the cultures of the Asian and European continents, giving rise to the development of the earliest urban centres of the age - western Anatolian cities such as Pergamum, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus and Didyma. The art that developed here had a direct and important influence on Roman civilisation, and established these western Anatolian cities as the cultural equals of Rome in its heyday.

Indeed, right up to the acme of the Byzantine period, in the 10th and 11C AD, the Eastern Roman pre-eminence in arhitecture, sculpture and painting rested on the prowess of her core Anatolian domains in these fields. After this, the scene began to be dominated by the Selçuks, masters of the art of building medreses (Islamic institutes of higher education), hospitals, observatories, bridges and Kervansarays - not to mention the other crafts, notably Carpet - weaving.

From the 13 C to the 20 C one of the world's most durable imperial dynasties, the Ottoman, impressed Its own seal (Tugra) on the culture of Anatolia in its entirety. The Ottomans created a vast territorial empire, based on the strength and integrity of the cultural resource base that was Anatolia.

So this is Anatolia, a land rich in heritage, home through the ages to peoples of diverse origins, diverse lives, diverse contribution-all preserved under its custodians of the last millennium, the Muslim Western Turks as dreamed by Atatürk.

Turks

omewhere in the vastness of Central Asia, a nomadic people ventured from one dried-up waterhole to the next, fighting drought, the torrid heat and the bitter cold of night. It was almost by a primitive law of nature that when these poor herdsman came upon cultivated lands they ransacked the riches. And while the names of Atilla the Hun, Cengiz Han and Timurlenk, riding at the front of their army, strike images of horror and bloodthirstiness in the minds of modern man, these figures must be evaluated within the drama of nomads versus settlers, the stirrup versus the plow. It is from this stock of people that the Turks emerged. Language alone sets them apart from Europeans, Slavs or Semitic peoples. Aside from the modern, western Turkish spoken in Turkey today, millions of Turkish people in parts of Iran, the Caucasus in Russia and Chinese Turkistan, speak a form of Turkish or other related languages like Mongolian or Uzbek, which belong to the Ural - Altaic family of languages, along with Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and - some say - Navaho.

The word "Turk" was first recorded in Chinese annals as early as 1300 B.C. It appears as T'u-chueh or Durko. The eighth century B.C. Orhun inscriptions found in Mongolia give an account of the ordeal of bringing tribes under a single authority against a major enemy, the Chinese. The inscriptions, written in runic characters, also reveal capital cities of tent-dwellers. An interesting on the east side reads:

"If the sky above did not collapse and if the earth below did not give way, Oh, Turkish people, who would be able to destroy your state and institutions?"

One learns more about the lifestyle of these people in the ancient Turkish epic, Dede Korkut. Ancient Turks were patriarchal, but monogamous. When the wife was unable to bear children it was accepted as the couple's fate, and taking another women is not mentioned. Instead of polygamy, Turks practiced exogamy-which is marrying outside one's tribe. In this way they established blood ties with neighboring tribes which won them allies and partially accounts for the confusion surrounding the differences between Mongols and Turks in the various dynasties, which arose in Central Asia. The most notable of these was the Empire of Timuçin or Cengiz Han, himself half-Mongol and half-Turkish.

The ancient Religion of these nomads was shamanism, a polytheistic faith with many totems and a lot of magic. Gradually, some tribes like the Uygurs adopted Buddhism, some became Zoroastrians, some Nestorians or Manicheans. The Hazar Turks, whose story is depicted in Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe adopted Judaism. Today a small number of Christian Turks, the Gagauz, survive in Poland, in addition to the Jewish Karaim Turks living in Baltic States.