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EDITORIAL NOTE
In the spring of 1917 the Foreign Office, in connection with the preparation which they were making for the work of the Peace Conference, established a special section whose duty it should be to provide the British Delegates to the Peace Conference with information in the most convenient form—geographical, economic, historical, social, religious and political—respecting the different countries, districts, islands, &c., with which they might have to deal. In addition, volumes were prepared on certain general subjects, mostly of an historical nature, concerning which it appeared that a special study would be useful.
The historical information was compiled by trained writers on historical subjects, who (in most cases) gave their services without any remuneration. For the geographical sections valuable assistance was given by the Intelligence Division (Naval Staff) of the Admiralty; and for the economic sections, by the War Trade Intelligence Department, which had been established by the Foreign Office. Of the maps accompanying the series, some were prepared by the above-mentioned department of the Admiralty, but the bulk of them were the work of the Geographical Section of the General Staff (Military Intelligence Division) of the War Office.
Now that the Conference has nearly completed its task, the Foreign 'Office, in response numerous enquiries and requests, has decided to issue the books for public use, believing that they will be useful to students of history, politics, economics and foreign affairs, to publicists generally and to business men and travellers. It is hardly necessary to say that some of the subjects dealt with in the series have not in fact come under discussion at the Peace Conference; but, as the books treating of them contain valuable information, it has been thought advisable to include them.
It must be understood that, although the series of volumes was prepared under the authority, and is now issued with the sanction, of the Foreign Office, that Office is not to be regarded as guaranteeing the accuracy of every statement which they contain or as identifying itself with all the opinions expressed in the several volumes; the books were not prepared in the Foreign Office itself, but are in the nature of information provided for the Foreign Office and the British Delegation.
The books are now published, with a few exceptions, substantially as they were issued for the use of the Delegates. No attempt has been made to bring them up to date, for, in the first place, such a process would have entailed a great loss of time and a prohibitive expense; and, in the second, the political and other conditions of a great part of Europe and of the Nearer and Middle East are still unsettled and in such a state of flux that any attempt to describe them would have been incorrect or misleading. The books are therefore to be taken as describing, in general, ante-bellum conditions, though in a few cases, where it seemed specially desirable, the account has been brought down to a later date.
W. Prothero
General Editor and formerly
Director of the Historical Section.
January 1920
Geography, physical and political
(1) Position and frontiers
The name Anatolia (Turkish "Anadolu" ) is derived from the Greek word (Sunrise" "East") which was used in the later Byzantine period to describe the Greek territories in Asia. In this ancient sense, the southern boundary of Anatolia was the Taurus Range, whose eastern portion was for long the frontier between the Byzantine and the Arab territories. By the Turks of to-day the name " Anadolu " is used in two different senses. Occasionally it covers the whole of the Ottoman possessions in Asia, and sometimes even Persia in addition, but commonly it means the peninsula of Asia Minor, up to an indeterminate line between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Black Sea. It is in the latter sense that "Anatolia" is now generally understood by Europeans. In this volume Anatolia is treated as consisting of the sanjaks of Ismid and Bigha, and the vilayets of Brusa, Aidin (or Smyrna), Kastamuni, Angora, Konia, and Adana, as they were constituted before the war.' The area is about 158,500 square miles.
(2) Surface, coasts, river system, and lakes
Surface and coasts
Anatolia consists of a lofty oblong central plateau, bordered on the north, the west, and the south by a rim of mountains, on the outer slopes of which is a fringe of coastland. The plateau is about 3,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level, and its surface is mainly composed of limestone, folded into ridges or penetrated by volcanic cones. The mountain rim is mostly of considerable breadth. On the north and south it is formed of chains parallel to the coast, the outermost of which generally fall abruptly to the sea.
On the west, however, the mountains slope gradually down to the coast for a hundred miles, and are separated from each other by river valleys, which provide avenues of communication between the coast and the interior.
It follows from the configuration of the land that the main routes across Anatolia have always been aligned roughly from west to east. The region, in fact, forms a natural bridge between the Balkan Peninsula and the interior of Asia, and has been used as such by merchants and soldiers from time immemorial. But there has never been much traffic between the Anatolian plateau and the north and south coasts.
The coastal region and the region of the interior present a sharp contrast. The first has more in common with southern Europe than with Asia. The second, in its surface, vegetation, and climate, betrays the fact that it is a western continuation of the mountains and steppes of Central Asia. The highlands of Asia Minor and those of Central Asia are practically identical in character ; they consist alike of arid plains, studded with oases and salt lakes into which sluggish rivers flow, and fringed by mountains with parallel folds. The Anatolian Peninsula has been aptly described as a bit of Asia set in a European littoral."
The central plateau may be divided, for the purpose of description, into three parts: (1) the Phrygian mountain region ; (2) the Lycaonian steppe ; and (3) the Galatian uplands.
1. The Phrygian mountain region extends from about the longitude of Ushak to about thirty miles east of Afium Karahissar, and is, indeed, continued to the ...
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