After the Sea Peoples cast aside the old world order at the end of the Bronze Age, a number of kingdoms in Anatolia filled the power vacuum for at least a few centuries, including the Phrygians and Lydians, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire would forge the world's largest empire with Anatolia as its heartland, but a number of Greek cities also began to pop up, and over the course of the region's turbulent history, their fortunes would rise and fall.

Smyrna was one of the various cities that enjoyed brief yet important periods of influence in which they spawned important dynasties, were the scenes of history-changing battles, and were the sites of great advances in philosophy, science, and economics. However, despite the fact it endured in influence for more than 2,000 years, Smyrna never truly gained the reputation of better-known locales in the ancient world.

Likewise, Miletus was an ancient city located on the west coast of present-day Turkey, which allowed it to become one of the most important places in Anatolia, linking the Hellenistic world with the great civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, and eventually Persia. Over time, Miletus was ruled by the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Ionians, Persians, Seleucids, Attalids, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuk Turks, and Ottomans. Perhaps not surprisingly, it had a massive influence on the Western world during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, as a revolution in human thinking took place there, most notably thanks to a man named Thales, who is widely recognized as the first philosopher for the Western tradition.

Although it is no longer quite as well remembered as it was thousands of years ago, one of the most important cities in the ancient world was Ephesus, a city that dates back nearly 3,000 years and can lay claim to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Moreover, while Sparta and Athens were often the centers of power in ancient Greece, Ephesus, located in present-day Turkey on the coast of Ionia, was an instrumental part of the Ionian League, which wielded power for a substantial period of time before the Classical Era.

In 353 BCE, when King Mausolus of Halicarnassus passed away, his sister and queen Artemisia was inconsolable, but she found a way to honor him through finishing a project that they had started together during his life: the construction of a mausoleum that was so marvelous it would later be considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. She sent messengers across the ancient world to persuade the best sculptors and architects to come to southeast Anatolia to work on the king's memorial, employing only the finest craftsmen and sparing no expense in making the final resting place of Mausolus the finest tomb the world had ever seen. But that was only part of the story, because Halicarnassus had been around for several centuries before it became a major power in its own right.

All of these cities had to deal cautiously with the Achaemenid Persians, and some were ultimately placed under the empire's domain outright, but the Greco-Persian Wars also directly set the Achaemenids on a confrontational path with Alexander the Great in the mid-4th century after the Macedonian king became the Hegemon of Greece and then set his sights to the east. Alexander's conquests destroyed the Achaemenid Empire, so when he died at nearly the height of his powers in 323 BCE, his generals, all of them with the loyalty of their own forces at their backs, would tear each other apart in a vicious internal struggle that lasted almost half a century before four factions emerged victorious.