The landscape of Anatolia varies little. Mountains, valleys and plateaux form its main constituents. Marsh and lake are rare. Only in the central waste land near Konia is there anything of the kind and a small group of lakes in the Isbarta region.
From the Troad along the Ionian coast to Aidin and round to the south coast as far as Adana the coastline and the foothills of the plateau enjoy a climate that is essentially Mediterranean.
The remainder of Asia Minor up to the present frontier on the east has frequent light snowfalls in winter and a dry hot summer, averaging some 90°. The chief rainfall comes in early summer in the very centre of the plateau and there is the smallest in all Turkey, being under io inches per annum. This area is that be tween Kutahia and Kaisarieh and includes the central desert.
Outside this zone and up to the wooded coastal belt the rainfall increases and is between io and 20 inches. The belt itself has the heavier fall of between 20 and 3o while most of eastern Thrace and Gallipoli has the maximum of 3o-4o inches.
North-westwards the unity is not so marked and there are as yet no known sites in Eastern Thrace and the Dobrudja which can extend the area.
It is impossible for us to establish either the earliest date for human habitation in Asia Minor, or the affinities of the most primitive objects hitherto found. Our knowledge begins really with the intrusive peoples of the early Bronze Age or of the Chalkolithic Age and our only fully excavated site for this period lies on the periphery rather than in the centre of the region— namely Troy (Hissarlik) and even so it was excavated some fifty years ago when the science of stratigraphical excavation was hardly developed.
Geographically the river Halys has always formed a boundary in Asia Minor. Within its wide sweep there developed towards the end of the third millennium B.C. a civilisation which can be regarded as wholly Anatolian—the Hittite (q.v.). The origin of this vigorous and virile culture is at present unknown. But in all probability it was composed of a blend of indigenous Cappa docian culture with instrusive elements from west and north east. It was probably the most characteristically Anatolian cul ture that has ever grown up in the plateau of Asia Minor. In comparison the culture of Troy, which lived as its neighbour, must be considered as European.
In the middle of the third millennium, and even earlier, the highlands of Cappadocia were being actively exploited for their precious metals and their copper by colonies of Semitic speaking peoples whose transactions have been found recorded on tablets at Kiil-Tepe, a village not far from Boghaz Keui (the site which later became the great capital of the Hittite empire). While these Semites were exploiting the region the Hittite empire had not even begun to germinate. By 1750 the Hittites are heard of in Baby lonian records. They are then powerful, organised and militant. Boghaz and Boz Eyiik in the Yozgad region are the greatest and the earliest Hittite sites thus far explored. The great library of archives in the shape of tablets inscribed in cuneiform at the former site constitute our greatest body of first hand evidence for Hittite culture.