indigenous (Hattic) and foreign cultures, especially Hurrian and Babylonian, producing its own distinctive blend. Their cities had two sectors surrounded by massive stone fortification walls: a citadel, with two- or three-story buildings (archive, storage and administrative buildings, and residence of the ruler) on stone foundations with a superstructure of mud brick and timber, and a lower, residential area (Seeher 1999). Access into the city was by a gate flanked by towers and protected by guardian creatures or by a postern gate—the best-known example of which at Bogazköy through the Yerkapī rampart, has a corbeled roof and is 71 meters long. Religious worship featured prominently among the Hittites. Bogazköy alone has revealed some thirty temples at this stage, and nearby is the rock sanctuary at Yazılıkaya with its relief panels. The temple complex was situated in a colonnaded courtyard that was surrounded by numerous storage rooms. Other important Hittite sites are Masat, Alaca, Kuşaklı, and Kaman-Kalehöyük.

In the clay tablets found in the archive at Bogazköy, mention is made of the Ahhiyawa, often cited as the Mycenaeans, whose presence is attested along the west coast of Anatolia at about this time. Indeed, the quest to identify Homer’s Troy with either Level VI or VIIA, despite the difficulties of disentangling the complicated fabric of that great narrative, has continued unabated. One thing is certain—the internationalism between Anatolia, the Aegean, and Syria-Palestine is evident in the flourishing trading networks vividly reflected by the rich cargo found on board the Uluburun shipwreck.

East-central Anatolian sites in the Malatya-Elazıg region were heavily influenced by trends in the central plateau, as evidenced by the increase in the size of the sites, fortification systems at Arslantepe VB and Korucutepe F, and affinities in ceramic styles. Along the foothills of the southern Taurus Mountains, settlements such as Lidar Höyük (Levels 8–9) have an assemblage indistinguishable from those at sites in the Amuq Plain, including Alalakh VII, which was built by Yarimlim, a vassal of the Yamkhad kingdom based at modern Aleppo.

Still farther east, in the modern provinces of Erzurum, Kars, and Van, the scene in the second millennium b.c. was quite different, and the axis of influence was eastern rather than southern. No city-states were to be found in these highlands. At Sos Höyük there is clear evidence that the earlier Kura-Araxes cultural complex continued to endure in a modified form (Sagona 2000). Dwellings were different, now solidly built and multiroomed, but, significantly, the deceased were buried in deep shaft graves and supplied with grave goods that have marked similarities to the Trialeti kurgan barrow burials of Transcaucasia, which may point to the arrival of newcomers.

The Iron Age

The stable and prosperous late–Bronze Age kingdoms of Anatolia suffered sociopolitical and economic collapse between about 1250 and 1150 b.c., as did many of Anatolia’s neighbors in the Aegean and the Near East. The impact of the invasions that brought about the decline in Anatolia had severely shaken the land and radically changed the map of the subsequent Iron Age. New ruling classes emerged in the centuries that followed, often described as a “dark age” because both archaeological and written records are meager, allowing scholars to sketch only the broadest political and social divisions of Anatolia in the Iron Age (Çilingiroglu and Matthews 1999; Joukowsky 1996).

Eastern Greeks established a number of city-states along the Aegean coast, among them Miletus and Ephesus. Western and central Anatolia was the domain of the Phrygians, the Mushki of the Assyrian records, who had formed a kingdom with centers at Gordion and Midas City by the ninth and eighth centuries b.c. The very few inscriptions in Phrygian, some in beeswax, were written in a new alphabetic script devised by the Phoenicians, which was also adopted by the Greeks, Carians, Lydians, and Lycians. Along the Pontic and in parts of the Hittite homeland, the Kaska, a feared mountainous folk, reigned supreme, whereas the southeast was occupied by the East Luwians, who were ethnically and culturally related to the Hittites. These Luwian-speakers were organized into a number of small neo-Hittite