By 1400 the Hittite Empire was at the height of its power and had become an international state of great importance in the Near East. Gradually the Hittite extended southwards towards Syria, and Carchemish on the upper Euphrates became an outpost city of great importance and wealth, while the whole of the mod ern province of Aintab bears witness to Hittite settlement. But in 1288 at the battle of Kadesh, Hittite power received a check. Soon after, about 1200, a disaster seems to have overtaken both the Hittite Empire and the more European power in north-west Asia Minor. Troy and Boghaz Keui seem to have been wiped out more or less at the same time.
Of the Phrygians we know all too little, but we can be certain that after 1200 they form the predominant element in Northern Anatolia, that they are racially akin to the Achaeans of Greece, that they are Aryans by race and speech, and that their language is closely allied to Latin on the one hand and to Thracian on the other. But again our archaeological evidence is wanting. We have no archaeological context for them. Gordion, an admittedly Phrygian site, is late and tells us nothing of the Phrygians of a time before i000. Whoever they were—and perhaps they can be identified with the people known as the Muski or Moschoi—they succeed the Hittites as masters of Anatolia. They are also virile enough to have lasted as a separate people into the third century of our era, using their own language down to Christian times.
As the Hittite Empire fell so the southern colonial settlements like Carchemish became isolated city states more or less depend ent upon the rising Assyrian power. Hittite cities are few ; be sides the three already mentioned there is one more, recently identified (in 1927), at Kiirigin Kaleh on the Halys near the point where the new Angora-Kaisarieh railway crosses it. It is of great area and evidently a site of considerable importance. Its walls can still be traced. But signs of Hittite domination are found widespread in Asia Minor in the shape of rock-sculptures and fortresses.
From the time of the fall of the Hittite Empire about 1200 B.C. the history of Asia Minor becomes obscure and archaeology has little to give us. By the end of the seventh century the Lydian empire had established itself on the ruins of the western part of the Hittite regions. The Ionian coast, always a self-contained region whose inhabitants lived a life apart from that of the rest of the Asia Minor, contained a heterogeneous body of settlers who had never fallen directly under the Hittite yoke and who were never united into one power until the Persians welded their empire to reach to the Aegean. Lydians, Lycians, Carians and many other
semi-barbaric peoples had retained a semblance of independence throughout the Hittite domination largely because of contact with the Achaeans and seafaring peoples of the west.
Lycians and Carians, however remain without archaeological content except for the sixth century tombs of Lycia, based wholly on the Greek styles of architecture and sculpture.
The fall of Troy and of the Hittite empire alike laid the Ana tolian coast open to western enterprise and by 700 Greeks were pouring over from the islands and the mainland and founding colonies and settlements along the whole coastline. Ephesus, Priene, Magnesia on the Maeander, Miletus and Sardis have been thoroughly excavated and throw a flood of light upon the Greek period from 65o down to the Hellenistic times. Pergamon has produced the finest discoveries of the Hellenistic period in the shape of the mighty sculptures of the altar of Zeus, now to be seen in Berlin. Tralles has added to our knowledge of Hellenistic art. Sardis illuminates us but little for the earlier Lydian period but fully for the Hellenic. Clazomenae and Cnidus have given us of the treasures of early Greek art.
The Roman period is as fully represented and at Angora sur vives one of the most important Roman documents extant in the shape of the Monumentum Ancyranum, the will of Augustus, in scribed on the walls of a small temple. Roman roads as well as roads built by the Persians, Roman aqueducts and the elements of a prosperous Roman province survive throughout Anatolia.
Byzantine power is represented by many great cities of which Nicaea (Isnik) was the most important, as being the centre of Greek reaction and reorganisation after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Unfortunately nothing of Nicaea now remains except the walls, and all the churches, in which were some of the finest mosaics extant, were destroyed during the Turco Greek war of 1921. Aphrodisias, a Byzantine town of the interior along the Maeander valley inland from Aidin, has produced an astonishing wealth of exceptionally interesting works of early Byzantine art.