TİMUÇİN BİNDER'İN NOTLARI

Türkçesi Luviler. Batı Anadolu'nun ve muhtemelen Ege Denizi bölgesinin ilk sakinleri The Hellenes were certainly neither the first Anatolians nor the first group in the region. Even when one limits the issue with the coast of western Anatolia, we know that the place they came to and settled down later was not empty. In fact, the discourse of Anatolians versus Hellenes owes its existence to this information. We also have an idea, to a certain extent, about how to name these groups that were in this region right before the Greeks. They go by the name Luwians.     It seems that the Luwians had settled in this land, region, before the Greeks did. Of course, one needs to ask which Hellenes these were. Are we talking here about only the Ionians, Dorians and Aeolians or are we going as far back as the first Greeks, those who we today call Mycenaeans but they appear as Ahhiyawans, Argives, Achaeans and Danaois in history? However, in both cases, one comes across the ...

Türkçesi için Yakın ama uzak, benzer ama farklı Anadolu geçmişleri It is possible to approach the past of Anatolia from various directions. As I mentioned it in my previous blog-post, we should try to think in terms of a freedom that enables us to choose from among different pasts; and in fact, in this period when all kinds of nationalisms are spreading again and at least as strong as the previous ones, this seems to be an important potential freedom or right to be placed under legal protection.  First of all, the ambiguity surrounding the term Anatolia (in fact, this is rather a choice or preference in itself) imposes the obligation to make a choice right from the very beginning. But, even if one thinks that there is no ambiguity, the past itself, because it can be traced back through more than one line, pathway, leads one to more than one approach regarding how and from where to start; therefore, because of the discontinuities between regions, it is not easy to study the o...

Türkçesi için Farklı Anadolu Tarihleriyle Özdeşleşme Özgürlüğü When one starts to speak about the past, that is, the history or histories, of the present-day Turkey, or the present-day Anatolia, to use the usual but geographically wrong expression,  then various, sometimes rather unpleasant, discussions may generally ensue. The source of these clashes is almost always that someone sees, wants to see, a genetic, biological, relationship between those who live here today and those who lived here in the past. A connection between these two is usually not wanted by most and therefore, a claim is usually put forward that those who were here before were replaced entirely by those who are here now; in other words, there was no mixing. Present-day genetic studies indicate the opposite is true. More or less some mixing seems to have taken place. But, everything aside, let us assume, for a second, that the hypothesis put forward is correct; that is, when some people were entering Ana...

How to write or rewrite the history of Turkey is a question that I believe has been on the agenda in Turkey lately, getting more attention by the day. To me a history, history of any kind, is an explanation that is meant to last until the conditions that make it possible get disrupted. A historical discourse is valid as long as the explanation it offers about whatever it is trying to explain seems believable or does work. What I am saying here is not much different from what the “punctuated equilibrium” theory in the evolutionary biology says about life on Earth. A history works until it satisfies the need to have explanations about certain topics, problems, questions and etc in some cultural habitat. When it starts losing this capacity, suddenly there appear various attempts to offer a new explanation and they go on until the members of the cultural habitat that the previous historical discourse used to organize agree upon a new history. Then there is another long period of nothing; ...