The chief Turkish route leaves the Euphrates at the angular bend near Meskeneh. A two-days’ journey across the desert brought the traveler to Aleppo. Beyond, the ancient road hugged the shores of the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean and, passing over the dull gray of the broad Cilician plain, headed for the huge cleft in the limestones of the Taurus, known as the Cilician Gates. Past this breach it is the plateau of Anatolia—a region whose physical isolation has always influenced the life of its inhabitants. Today, south of the Cilician Gates, the land is Arabian in speech and Semitic in thought, while in the country to the north the prevailing language is Turkish, which differs from the refinement of Arabian as markedly as the crudity of the Turkish mind differs from the intellectuality of the Arabian.
Thus through mountain tract and mountain trough the east found its way into the Anatolian plateau. Conversely the west made several successful scalings of its slopes. The valleys leading westward into the Ægean or northward into the Black Sea acted as breaches which facilitated human travel. Among these the Meander, Gediz and Sakaria are noteworthy. The “Royal Road” of the Persian period connected Ephesus with Susa by way of the Cilician Gates. It is described by Herodotus. Official despatch-bearers traveled over it in the fulfilment of their missions. Ramsay places this road north of the desert center of Asia Minor[202] and considers the southern route as the highway of the Graeco-Roman period. This last road is the shortest and easiest between Ægean ports and the Cilician Gates.
The history of inland Asia Minor is the record of travel over the network of the region’s roads. Its chief events consist of military marches and trade travels. Urban life on this section of the peninsula had its origin in caravan halts. The cities of inner Anatolia represent successive stages of east-west travel. Their alignment serves to trace the course of the road. To our own day this part of Turkey has not been a land of settlement.
In the southeastern half of Turkey human life has also been confined to highway regions. This part of the world is known to us as Syria or Mesopotamia. Both are depressed regions—channels of human flows—bordering the western and eastern sides of the Great Syrian desert which, wedge-like, interposes its shifting solitude of sand between the two as far as the foothills of the mountains on the north. West of Syria lies the Mediterranean; east of Mesopotamia the mountains of Persia. With such a pattern of land carving, it was natural that life and activity should have gathered in the precise regions where the historian finds them.
A dominant fact recurs in every stage of the region’s history. Turkey is so placed that its possession is the goal of every nation which has risen to eminence in or around Turkish lands. Its control ushers in a period of great prosperity in every instance. Trade flows freely in the highways, carrying prosperity in its wake. The energy of the fortunate nation is spent to maintain the economic advantages secured. The loss of the highway zone is accompanied by national decline. A new nation rises and obtains the mastery of the road, and the cycle is repeated. The western Asiatic highway may aptly be named a highway of wealth or of misfortune.
At the beginning of the first pre-Christian millennium the struggle for the possession of this highway was as keen and sanguinary as it is at present. The empires of the Nile and Mesopotamian basins, of the Syrian strip and of the Hittite mountain lands mustered the flower of their manhood in yearly arrays for the purpose of seizing or guarding the great arteries of west Asiatic traffic. The short-lived prosperity of the Jewish empire, at the time of Solomon, was attained immediately after the country’s boundaries extended from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Judea grew to splendor by becoming sole mistress of the international routes which traversed Syria and Mesopotamia. Her greatness was transmitted to Assyria with the loss of the land routes to that same empire in the eighth century B.C. A hundred years later the Chaldeans obtained possession of the highways. It is now their turn to impose their will on neighboring nations. Another century slips by and with it the greatness of Semitic states. In the east, men of Aryan speech, mostly Persians, have begun to value the present Turkish land routes. In 560 B.C. Cyrus is at the head of cohorts which soon after give him mastery of Turkish Asia from the Ægean to the Persian Gulf. To this conquest Darius adds Egypt and India.
All these events center around one of the greatest struggles ever fought between men. It is the conflict between Europeans and Asiatics immortalized in Hellenic literature,—the clash between two continents, each battling for the exclusive control of the highway connecting them. The contestants met on this Turkish highway, they fought over its plains and defiles, and battled for its possession in the realization that the economic prosperity upon which national wealth and greatness rest could be secured only by its conquest.
A significant fact of the celebrated struggle is revealed by the inability of the Greeks to conquer the Persians. They defeated them and checked their westerly advance. The Ægean and Eurasian waterways of Turkey proved an impassable moat to the Persian invaders. As long as the Persians retained control of the highways the menace of their brutal despotism faced the liberal spirit of the Greeks. The danger was dispelled by Alexander’s conquest of the highway. No better instance of the power vested in the effective hold of these lines of communication between the east and west can be found.
All the history of Turkish lands is conditioned by their location on the map. The region has occupied a conspicuous position on the stage of world events since the earliest known times. Faint rays of prehistoric light reveal it as the bridge over which the race of round-headed men crossed into Europe from Asia. During antiquity we find it to be the original seat of civilizations which radiate outward in every direction. In medieval times it is the great half-way station of the main artery of world trade. We know of it in modern days as the center of a mighty international struggle familiarly known as the Eastern Question.
A world relation of such an enduring character must obviously rest on exceedingly firm foundations. A search for its causes leads us straight into the field of geography. Three elements, namely, those of position, form and natural resources are primarily accountable for the extraordinary interest which Turkey has always awakened. The region is the Asiatic extension of Mediterranean lands nestling against the great central mountain mass of Asia. It is sharply separated from the rest of the continent by a mountain wall which extends continuously from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf and is made up of the Armenian and Zagros ranges. It is a peninsula, itself formed by two distinct peninsulas, and one of the unit divisions of the Asiatic continent in the sense that it is the only part of the entire Asiatic continent subject to Mediterranean climatic influences.