The finds from the caves at Döngel village in the Tekir valley show that human settlement here began in the Upper Palaeolithic and continued through the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. In the Middle Bronze Age, between 2000 and 1500 BC, the district lay at the junction of the caravan roads that linked Syria and Mesopotamia to Cappadocia and the other parts of Anatolia.
Markasi — Maraş — was the centre of Gurgum, one of the Hittite states founded as the empire broke up, and the city state was attached at intervals to Urartu and to Assyria. Cimmerians and Scythians invaded in the 7th century BC; the Medes took it at the end of that century and the Persians in the 6th. It stayed for many years inside the Persian satrapy of Cappadocia, and passed to the Macedonians in 333 BC.
