The Anatolian peninsula, comprising most of modern Turkey, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions in the world. The earliest Neolithic settlements such as Çatalhöyük (Pottery Neolithic), Çayönü (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A to Pottery Neolithic), Nevalı Çori (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B), Hacılar (Pottery Neolithic), Göbekli Tepe (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A) and Mersin are considered to be among the earliest human settlements in the world.

The settlement of Troy starts in the Neolithic and continued into the Iron Age. Through recorded history, Anatolians have spoken Indo-European, Semitic and Kartvelian languages, as well as many languages of uncertain affiliation. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical center from which the Indo-European languages have radiated.

The Celsus Library in Ephesus, dating from 135 AD.The first major empire in the area was that of the Hittites, from the eighteenth through the thirteenth century BC. The Assyrians colonized parts of southeastern Turkey as far back as 1950 BC until the year 612 BC, when the Assyrian Empire was conquered by the Chaldean dynasty in Babylon.

Following the Hittie collapse, the Phrygians, an Indo-European people, achieved ascendancy until their kingdom was destroyed by the Cimmerians in the 7th century BCE. The most powerful of Phrygia's successor states were Lydia, Caria and Lycia.

The Lydians and Lycians spoke languages that were fundamentally Indo-European, but both languages had acquired non-Indo-European elements prior to the Hittite and Hellenistic periods. Starting around 1200 BC, the coast of Anatolia was heavily settled by Aeolian and Ionian Greeks.

Numerous important cities were founded by these colonists, such as Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna (modern Izmir), and Byzantium (later Constantinople and Istanbul). Anatolia was conquered by the Persian Achaemenid Empire during the sixth and fifth centuries BC and later fell to Alexander the Great in 334 BC.

Anatolia was subsequently divided into a number of small Hellenistic kingdoms (including Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pergamum, and Pontus), all of which had succumbed to the Roman Republic by the mid-1st century BC