In the classical world this coast was Cilicia, and Mersin sits in the middle of it. The list of rulers is long and mostly uninterrupted: Hittites, Phrygians, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans and Byzantines, then the Seljuks in the 11th century, the Karamanids and Ramazanids in the 14th, and the Ottomans in the 15th.
Two excavations show how far back settlement goes. Yumuktepe, inside the city itself, was first dug by archaeologists from the University of Liverpool in 1937, and the lowest layer they reached was Neolithic. Later seasons traced the site through the transition from the Neolithic into the Copper and Bronze Ages. Gözlükule at Tarsus, a short way east, shows almost the same sequence.
The written history begins with the Hittites, whose king Hattušili is credited with building up and improving the area. After the Roman empire split, Cilicia stayed on the eastern side, and with the spread of Islam it passed to Arab rule under the caliph Osman before going to the Abbasids. Under the Seljuks the region saw part of the Crusader advance.
