Anatolia

Anatolia (Turkish: Anadolu), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean Sea to the west, the Turkish Straits to the northwest, and the Black Sea to the north. The eastern and southeastern limits have been expanded either to the entirety of Asiatic Turkey or to an imprecise line from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Alexandretta. Topographically, the Sea of Marmara connects the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and separates Anatolia from Thrace in Southeast Europe.

During the Neolithic, Anatolia was an early center for the development of farming after it originated in the adjacent Fertile Crescent. Beginning around 9,000 years ago, there was a major migration of Anatolian neolithic farmers into Europe, with their descendants coming to dominate the continent as far west as the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles.

The earliest recorded inhabitants of Anatolia, who were neither Indo-European nor Semitic, were gradually absorbed by the incoming Indo-European Anatolian peoples, who spoke the now-extinct Anatolian languages. The major Anatolian languages included Hittite, Luwian, and Lydian; other local languages, albeit poorly attested, included Phrygian and Mysian. The Hurro-Urartian languages were spoken throughout Mitanni in the southeast, while Galatian, a Celtic language, was spoken throughout Galatia in the central peninsula. Among the other peoples who established a significant presence in ancient Anatolia were the Galatians, the Hurrians, the Assyrians, the Armenians, the Hattians, and the Cimmerians, as well as some of the ancient Greek tribes, including the Ionians, the Dorians, and the Aeolians. In the era of classical antiquity (see Classical Anatolia), the Anatolian languages were largely replaced by the Greek language, which came to dominate a large region during the Hellenistic period and the Roman period.

The Byzantine period saw the height and eventual decline of Greek influence throughout the peninsula as the Byzantine–Seljuk wars enabled the incoming Seljuk Turks to establish a foothold in the region. Thus, the process of Anatolia's Turkification began under the Seljuk Empire in the late 11th century and continued under the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century, when the Ottoman dynasty collapsed in the aftermath of World War I. Between 1894 and 1924, millions of non-Turkic peoples and Christians, especially Greeks (about two million) and Armenians (649,000), were killed by the Ottoman Turkish authorities or expelled from the bulk of the area of modern-day Turkey. Nonetheless, a variety of non-Turkic languages continue to be spoken by ethnic minorities in Anatolia today, including Arabic, Kurdish, Neo-Aramaic, Armenian, the North Caucasian languages, Laz, Georgian, and Greek.

Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to an indefinite line running from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Black Sea, coterminous with the Anatolian Plateau. This traditional geographical definition is used, for example, in the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary. Under this definition, Anatolia is bounded to the east by the Armenian Highlands, and the Euphrates before that river bends to the southeast to enter Mesopotamia. To the southeast, it is bounded by the ranges that separate it from the Orontes valley in Syria and the Mesopotamian plain.

Following the Armenian genocide, Western Armenia was renamed the Eastern Anatolia region by the newly established Turkish government. In 1941, with the First Geography Congress which divided Turkey into seven geographical regions based on differences in climate and landscape, the eastern provinces of Turkey were placed into the Eastern Anatolia region, which largely corresponds to the historical region of Western Armenia. Vazken Davidian terms the expanded use of "Anatolia" to apply to territory in eastern Turkey that was formerly referred to as Armenia (which had a sizeable Armenian population before the Armenian genocide) an "ahistorical imposition" and notes that a growing body of literature is uncomfortable with referring to the Ottoman East as "Eastern Anatolia".

The highest mountain in the Eastern Anatolia region (also the highest peak in the Armenian Highlands) is Mount Ararat (5123 m). The Euphrates, Aras, Karasu and Murat rivers connect the Armenian Highlands to the South Caucasus and the Upper Euphrates Valley. Along with the Çoruh, these rivers are the longest in the Eastern Anatolia region.

The English-language name Anatolia derives from the Greek Ἀνατολή (Anatolḗ) meaning "the East" and designating (from a Greek point of view) eastern regions in general. The Greek word refers to the direction where the sun rises, coming from ἀνατέλλω anatello '(Ι) rise up', comparable to terms in other languages such as "levant" from Latin levo 'to rise', "orient" from Latin orior 'to arise, to originate', Hebrew מִזְרָח mizraḥ 'east' from זָרַח zaraḥ 'to rise, to shine', Aramaic מִדְנָח midnaḥ from דְּנַח denaḥ 'to rise, to shine'.