SPACE June 2025 (No. 691)
The Anatolian Peninsula:
The Crucible of Humanity Where Ancient Civilisations and Torrid Histories Rise and Fall
Türkiye is a vast open-air museum. Not only is it a geographical, historical, and cultural crossroads where Eastern and Western civilisations have long converged, but it is also the true cradle in which the myths and technologies of our human ‘civilisation’ first took root. Take Istanbul, for example—a city of 20 million people. From the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation to the Orient, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Islam, the city encapsulates 5,000 years of human stories, wisdom, and creative experimentation, all woven into its fabric. The historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s description of Türkiye as a ‘living open-air museum of human civilisation’ is by no means an exaggeration.
The territory of Türkiye is also known as the Anatolian Peninsula; literally, ‘the land where the sun rises’. True to its name, Anatolia has long served as the stage for numerous ancient civilisations and myths, as well as the backdrop for much of the Old Testament. It was the heartland of great cultures and empires: Troy, the Amazons, the Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Lycians, and the Persian Empire. Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey were born here, as were Aesop’s Fables. Anatolia is also the setting for Noah’s Ark and the Garden of Eden, the biblical city of Harran – home to Abraham and the Apostle Paul – the House of the Virgin Mary, and the earliest Seven Churches of Christianity. The importance of the Anatolian Peninsula as the ‘cradle of human civilisation’ became even more concrete in 2014, when archaeological excavations at the site of Göbekli Tepe uncovered more than 20 temple cities dating back 12,000 years. These discoveries of ultra-ancient civilisations were a groundbreaking event that pushed the origins of human civilisation back more than 7,000 years. However, the creators of these civilisations have no connection to today’s Turks. They officially settled in the Anatolian Peninsula only after the year 1071, becoming its new rulers.
The New Rulers of Anatolia
From around 2,000 BCE, the Turks built 16 empires and more than 100 small states across the vast Eurasian steppes, developing a highly advanced Steppe Culture based on iron and horses. Among the great Central Asian empires es...
