Gaziantep lies between Mesopotamia, where the first civilisations appeared, and the Mediterranean, at a crossing point of important roads that the historic Silk Road also used. That position is why it has been settled since prehistory and why it has stayed commercially, culturally and artistically important down to the present day.
By some accounts the city's history reaches back to around 5600 BC, which would make it one of the oldest settlements in the world. It passed through the Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic into the Bronze Age, and afterwards housed Mesopotamian, Hittite, Mitanni, Assyrian, Median, Persian, Macedonian, Greek, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Arab-Islamic and Turkish-Islamic civilisations in turn. The Chalcolithic — the period marked by the use of copper alongside stone — is represented locally at Sakçagözü.
