A traveller arriving in Mersin today would be submerged by the traffic and buildings of a lively, modern metropolis, never imagining that they are walking through a city whose origins are among the earliest in the world. Thanks to the excavationsYumuktepe,we now know that the area in which modern Mersin is expanding constituted an exceptional centre of life that acted as a meeting point between East and West, in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, for more than 9000 years. The archive of this uninterrupted sequence in history to this day lies,English layer upon layer, at Yumuktepe,a mound of earth that stands in the very heart of the city.
This aim of this small book is to provide the reader with a short summary of this long sequence of Mediterranean history, with all its peculiarities, using the most significant images from the excavations.