Bartın and Amasra have four thousand years behind them, and for much of it they lived separate lives on the same coast. One account holds that between 3000 and 2400 BC, before the Achaeans founded Mycenaean civilisation in the Aegean, they settled the western Anatolian shores — Samsun, Sinop and Amasra among them — and taught the local people the crafts of the Copper Age, while inland the Kaška and the Hittites held sway. The first owners of Bartın itself were the Kaška in the 14th century BC and the Hittites in the 13th.
From the 12th century BC the two places sat on opposite sides of a border: Bartın inside Bithynia, Amasra inside Paphlagonia. By the end of that century Bartın had passed to the Phrygians and Amasra to the Phoenicians. After that the whole district changed hands with the region — Cimmerians at the end of the 7th century BC, Lydians in the 6th, Persians from 547, Macedonians from 334, Pontos from 279 and Rome from 64.
