The modern city of İstanbul is the sixth largest metropolis in the world. Its beginnings were modest but important settlements dating from the later part of the Stone Age. Recent discoveries have suggested that the area has been inhabited since the 7th millennium BC. Artifacts from the Neolithic period have been discovered on the European side of the city, and nearby remains from the slightly later Copper Age have been found. The remnants of a Phoenician settlement and the Greek city of Chalcedon are also to be seen on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Over the subsequent centuries, many great structures and important monuments were to be erected in these areas as the successor cities became the centers of first Orthodox and then Islamic culture.
The earliest settlement, dating from about 6700 BCE, was found in 2008 during subway construction and the building of the first rail link between Europe and Asia. Skeletons and domestic artifacts were found along with evidence of houses made from tree branches, and indications that farming and fishing had been introduced, and are now displayed in the İstanbul Archeology Museums. This appears to have been part of the “Neolithic Revolution”, in which Stone Age nomads settled down, lived in communities and farmed and fished rather than hunting and gathering, caught here as it was being spread into Europe.
A slightly later settlement has been excavated in the district of Kadiköy on the European side of the Bosporus strait, dating from 5000-3000 BCE. The Fikirtepe Mound has yielded Copper Age stoneware, bronze utensils and jewelry which are also displayed at the Archeology Museums along with artifacts and statuary from the nearby Greek city of Chalcedon that flourished several thousand years later.
The museum is actually three museums, one of the largest such complexes in the world, located in the outer buildings and gardens of the Topkapı Palace, where the Ottoman emperors resided until 1856. The impetus for the museum complex was a European tour by Sultan Abdülaziz in 1867, during which he was greatly impressed by the Louvre, the British Museum and the art and historical museums of Vienna. The adjacent Topkapı Palace has been since the establishment of the Turkish republic a vast museum devoted to Turkey’s imperial past, both structures being world historical sites almost perfectly representative of Ottoman architecture as well as preserving the ancient origins of İstanbul.