Why a timeline helps
Every site in Turkey sits on top of an older one. Ephesus has a Bronze Age hill, a Greek city, a Roman capital and a Byzantine basilica within a 3 km walk. Hagia Sophia was a church for 916 years and a mosque for most of the rest.
The eight eras below run in order, with the dates you need and one place where each can still be seen. Read it once and the labels on museum cases stop being noise.
The Hittites, about 1650 to 1180 BC
The Hittites built the first state to rule most of the peninsula. Their capital, Hattusa, stood on a rocky slope 200 km east of Ankara, with 6 km of walls, five gates and a great temple. The archives found there in 1906 held some 30,000 clay tablets in cuneiform, the oldest written Indo-European language known.
The empire fought Egypt to a draw at Kadesh in 1274 BC and then signed the earliest surviving peace treaty. A copy hangs at the United Nations in New York. Around 1180 BC the capital burned and the state collapsed, part of the wider Bronze Age breakdown that also ended Troy, which you can read about on the Ephesus and Troy sheet.
Where to see it: Hattusa and the nearby open-air sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, plus the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.
Phrygians and Lydians, 800 to 546 BC
Two smaller kingdoms filled the gap. The Phrygians, with their capital at Gordion west of Ankara, are remembered for King Midas, who was a real ruler around 720 BC, and for the knot Alexander later cut. Their burial mounds still rise from the plain, and one holds the oldest standing wooden building in the world.
The Lydians ruled the west from Sardis, near İzmir, and around 600 BC issued the first coins stamped with a guaranteed weight. Their last king, Croesus, gave his name to wealth. He misread an oracle, attacked Persia in 546 BC, and lost his kingdom.
Where to see it: Gordion, 95 km southwest of Ankara, and Sardis, 90 km east of İzmir.
Greeks and Persians, 546 to 133 BC
Greek colonies had dotted the Aegean coast since the eleventh century BC, and Miletus, Ephesus and Halicarnassus were among the richest cities in the Greek world. Persia ruled them from 546 BC, and their revolt in 499 BC drew Athens into the wars that followed.
Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334 BC, won his first battle at the Granicus, and freed the coast on his way east. After his death his generals divided the land, and the Attalid kings of Pergamon turned their hilltop into a second Athens with a library of 200,000 scrolls. The last Attalid left his kingdom to Rome in his will in 133 BC.
Where to see it: the theater and Temple of Athena at Pergamon, the Lycian tombs described on the Lycia sheet, and the Alexander Sarcophagus in Istanbul.
Rome, 133 BC to AD 330
Rome organized the west as the province of Asia, with Ephesus as its capital and its second-largest city after Rome itself. The Pax Romana of the first two centuries AD paid for the marble streets, aqueducts and theaters that fill the coast today. Paul of Tarsus preached in these cities, and the seven churches of Revelation are all in western Anatolia.
Earthquakes and Gothic raids in the third century weakened the region. In 324 Constantine won the civil war that made him sole emperor, and on May 11, 330, he dedicated a new capital at Byzantion on the Bosphorus, renamed Constantinople.
Where to see it: Ephesus, the theater at Aspendos near Antalya, Hierapolis above Pamukkale on the Inner Anatolia sheet.
Byzantium, 330 to 1453
The Eastern Roman Empire outlived the Western one by a thousand years, and its capital was the largest city in Europe for most of that time. Justinian rebuilt the church of Hagia Sophia between 532 and 537 after a riot burned the old church. The dome fell in 558 and rose again, higher, by 562.
Arab sieges in the seventh and eighth centuries pushed Christians into refuges like the rock valleys of Cappadocia. The iconoclast crisis banned religious images from 726 to 843.
After the Turkish victory at Manzikert in 1071 the empire lost the interior, and the Fourth Crusade sacked the capital in 1204. A reduced state fought on until May 29, 1453.
Where to see it: Hagia Sophia, the land walls and Chora Church in Istanbul, the painted churches of Göreme.
The Seljuks, 1071 to about 1300
The Seljuk Turks came out of Central Asia, converted to Islam, and defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert near Lake Van on August 26, 1071. Within a generation they held central Anatolia and set up their capital at Konya in 1097.
Their sultanate of Rum built madrasas, caravanserais and mosques with a taste for carved stone portals and turquoise tile. The Mongols broke Seljuk power at Köse Dağ in 1243, and the state dissolved into small principalities, the beyliks, by 1300. One of those beyliks, in the northwest, belonged to a man named Osman.
Where to see it: Konya's Alaeddin Mosque and Karatay Madrasa, the Sultanhanı caravanserai on the Konya road, Divriği in the east.
The Ottomans, 1299 to 1922
Osman's principality dates its founding to 1299. His son took Bursa in 1326, and the dynasty made it the first capital, then Edirne, then Constantinople after Mehmed II broke the walls in 1453. Under Süleyman, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, the empire ran from Budapest to Baghdad and the architect Sinan gave the capital its skyline.
The court's kitchens shaped what the country eats. Baklava took its layered form at Topkapı, and the confectioner Hacı Bekir opened the Istanbul shop that made Turkish delight famous in 1777.
The long decline was slower than the textbooks suggest. Reforms in the nineteenth century built railways, schools and the Dolmabahçe Palace.
Defeat in the First World War, followed by the occupation of Istanbul and a Greek landing at İzmir, brought the end. The Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate on November 1, 1922.
Where to see it: Topkapı Palace, Süleymaniye, the Green Tomb in Bursa, and the Ottoman kitchen that survives in Turkish cuisine.
The Republic, 1923 to today
Mustafa Kemal, later given the surname Atatürk, led the war of independence from Ankara and proclaimed the Republic on October 29, 1923. The new state made Ankara the capital, adopted the Latin alphabet in 1928, gave women the vote in 1934, and turned Hagia Sophia into a museum the same year.
For a visitor, the Republic's most useful legacy is the museum system, which took the finds from a century of foreign excavations and kept them in the country. Almost every site on this chart has a small local museum built after 1923, and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara, opened in 1968, is the place to see the whole timeline in a single afternoon.
Questions
Why is the region called Anatolia?
The name comes from the Greek anatole, meaning sunrise or east, because the peninsula lay east of Greece. The Turkish form, Anadolu, is the everyday word for the Asian part of the country.
Where can I see the Hittites?
Hattusa, near the village of Boğazkale 200 km east of Ankara, is the capital city with its walls, gates and temples. The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara holds the best finds, including the tablets and reliefs.
What is the difference between Byzantine and Eastern Roman?
Nothing. The people of Constantinople called themselves Romans until 1453. Byzantine is a label historians adopted in the sixteenth century, taken from the city's older name, Byzantion.
How long did the Ottoman Empire last?
About 620 years, from the founding of the principality in 1299 to the abolition of the sultanate on November 1, 1922. The Republic followed on October 29, 1923.
Which single museum covers all of this?
The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara for everything before Rome, and the Istanbul Archaeology Museums for the Greek, Roman and Byzantine centuries.