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The ancient kingdom of Cilicia in Asia Minor
was the area known to the Assyrians as Khilakku
in the west and Kue in the east. The western half, Cificia Tracheia ("rough
Cilicia"), is the rugged and still largely inaccessible and undeveloped
section of the Taurus stretching inland
from Anamur, while to the east is the fertile
Cilician plain of Cukurova, with its fields of grain and cotton and its
banana and citrus groves. This division of what is now a flourishing agricultural
region, with a well developed industrial base, still persists today, when
Cilicia roughly falls into two Turkish provinces, Icel,
with its capital at Mersin, and Adana,
the area around the industrial city of the same name at the heart of the
Cilician plain. Cilicia was never a kingdom in its own right for very long.
It was too much of a buffer state, too often a prey to the power struggles
of neighboring kingdoms. There is no doubting the fact, however, that
this was among the regions that served as the
cradle of ancient civilizations from the earliest
times. On the Cukurova plain alone, between Mersin
and Toprakkale, there are 150 historic sites, some dating as far back as
the Neolithic, Calcolithic and bronze ages, along with major ruins from
the Hittites right up to Classical Greece and Rome.
For thousands of years people have lived on these fertile alluvial plains
in the Taurus foreland, the legacy of the "rivers of Paradise", as the
Arabian geographers called the Seyhan and the Ceyhan.
Some of Cilicia was probably for a time part of the independent kingdoms of Arzawa and then Kizzuwadna (from about 1650 BC.), buffer states between the Hittites and the Mitanni. From 1196 BC it belonged for c.400 years to the late Hittite Kueli kingdom. After the established order in Anatolia was destroyed in the late 7th c BC by invading Scythian and Cimmerian "barbarians" from southern Russia, a kingdom of Cilicia south of the Taurus was one of the new political power structures which soon emerged as regions sought to establish their own identity. The Cilician kings who ruled in Tarsus as vassals of the Persians managed to retain a certain degree of independence and succeeded in expanding their territory as far as Cappadocia and Pamphylia.
Around 103 BC Cilicia came under the way of the Romans. However, it was not until 66 BC, when Pompei rooted out and destroyed the ferocious pirates from their lairs in the west, that Tarsus was made the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia. This ushered in a long period of prosperity, ended only in the 7th c AD by the Arabs sweeping up from the south. The Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (until 1375, Little Armenia) started to develop in the late 11th c. with support from the Crusaders after 1199, and Armenians were in fact to continue living in the Taurus mountains north-east of Adana and in Kahramanmaras (Maras) around Hacin until their deportation earlier this century.
Between 1352 and 1378 the Ramazanoglu nomads succeeded in winning for themselves a princedom from the Turcoman tribes who had been gradually moving in since 1185 from the north-east, and this was to survive for about 250 years despite its absorption into the Ottoman Empire in 1517.
With time, and against a background of growing political uncertainty (uprising at Celali and Saruca/ Sebkan), the demands of these wandering herdsmen led to the flat parts of Cilicia near the coast being turned over the winter pastures, where fewer and fewer people settled, and it was only when the nomadic way of life had to be abandoned in the late 19th c. that farming returned to the coastal plain again.
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The rich plain of Pamphylia, curving around the top of the Gulf
of Antalya between Antalya (Adalia, Attaleia)
in the westand Alanya (classical Coracesium, the "crow's nest", famous
for its pirates) in the east, against the impressive backdrop of the Bey
Daglari (over 2000m/6564ft) in the west and the Central Taurus in the north,
nestles almost like a piece of North Africa between its mountains and the
Mediterranean. The white chalk faces of the low foothills of the mountain
country of Pisidia in the north are covered with
pines and marquis, their lower slopes dotted with the ruins of ancient castles
and classical cities and the many villages crowding the well-watered valley
floors. The Pamphylian plain itself is rich alluvial farmland, given over
to the intensive
cultivation of vegetables, cotton, citrus fruits, and
bananas. Towards Lycia in the west, however, the
subsoil is of limestone tufa, and here the cultivated travertine terraces
start right at the foot of the mountains, falling steeply to the sea and
the ancient harbor of Antalya.
In classical times Pamphylia's most important cities were Adalia, Alanya, Perge, Aspendos and Side. The main period of settlement is thought to have been when Greek refugees mingled with the local peoples having fled here following the fall of Troy around 1184 BC. The name Pamphylia is ancient Greek for "land of all tribes" and an indication of just how colorful a mixture this must have been. Ruled in turn by the Lydians, Persians, Alexander the Great, Antigonos I, one of his successors, the Seleucids and Egypt's Ptolimites, it enjoyed a brief period of independence until the west of the region was ceded to the King of Pergamum in 188 BC. The Romans made it the heart of the military province of .Cilicia, then merged it with Lycia in the 1st c. AD to form a single province which reached the height of its prosperity in the 2nd c. AD. Earlier this part of the coast had also been notorious for its pirates who were to plague the Romans until their reign of terror was ended by Pompey. He also took the local cult of Mithraism back with him to Rome, and for a long time Mithras was the official protector of the Roman Empire and the great rival of the Christian religion. This local attachment to Mithraism made it particularly difficult for the early Christians to gain general acceptance of their new religion. As a consequence the Crusaders set up numerous small Christian enclaves, each with its castle, along the coast of Pamphylia and .Cilicia. The Italians seized on this fact, as "heirs to the Roman Empire" and representatives of the Church of Rome to lay claim to these coasts in the Turkish War of Liberation earlier this century.
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