Adana stands on the Seyhan, the river the ancients called the Sarus, which rises in the Taurus and winds across the plain to the Mediterranean. It was one of the main cities of ancient Cilicia, and in Greek myth its name comes from Adanus, a son of the sky god Uranus.
The mound in the middle of the modern city, Tepebağ, belongs to the Neolithic — the moment people first settled in one place. Its history reaches back to around 6000 BC, which puts Adana among the oldest continuously inhabited places anywhere. The city was the centre of the kingdom of Kizzuwatna before joining the Hittite federation around 1350 BC.
After that it changed hands about once a century. The Assyrians took it in the 9th century BC and the Persians in the 7th. Alexander and his army came through in 333 BC and after the battle of Issos the region went to the Macedonians, then to the Seleucids. It became Roman in the 1st century BC, when the orator Cicero was governor here, and grew into the largest trading centre of the eastern empire. The Sasanians came in AD 260, then Byzantium, the Abbasids, Byzantium again, the Seljuks, the Armenians and finally the Mamluks in the 14th century.
