Asia Minor

Asia Minor, peninsula in southwestern Asia including most of modern Turkey, mountainous and surrounded on 3 sides by the Black and Mediterranean seas, bounded on the east by the upper Euphrates River. After the destruction of the Hittite empire c.1200 B.C., the land was occupied successively by the Medes, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. In the 5th century of the present era it passed to the Byzantine emperors. It was settled by Turks beginning in the 13th century and became part of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth. The modern Turkish state was founded in 1923.