ABSTRACT
The Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923 after a war of independence, created a history for its people that completely and consciously bypassed its Ottoman predecessor. An ethnie called “the Turks,” existent in the multicultural Ottoman Empire only as a general name used by Europeans, was imagined and given a story linking it with the nomads of Central Asia, the former Hittite and Phrygian civilizations of Anatolia, and even indirectly with the ancient Sumerian and Assyrian civilizations of Mesopotamia. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, linguistic, anthropological, archaeological and historical studies were all conducted in order to formulate and sustain such claims.
