The ancient kingdom of Cilicia in Asia Minor was the area known to the Assyrians as Khilakku in the west and Kue in the east. The western half, Cificia Tracheia ("rough Cilicia"), is the rugged and still largely inaccessible and undeveloped section of the Taurus stretching inland from Anamur, while to the east is the fertile Cilician plain of Cukurova, with its fields of grain and cotton and its banana and citrus groves. This division of what is now a flourishing agricultural region, with a well developed industrial base, still persists today, when Cilicia roughly falls into two Turkish provinces, Icel, with its capital at Mersin, and Adana, the area around the industrial city of the same name at the heart of the Cilician plain. Cilicia was never a kingdom in its own right for very long. It was too much of a buffer state, too often a prey to the power struggles of neighboring kingdoms. There is no doubt, however, that this was among the regions that served as the cradle of ancient civilizations from the earliest times. On the Cukurova plain alone, between Mersin and Toprakkale, there are 150 historic sites, some dating as far back as the Neolithic, Calcolithic and bronze ages, along with major ruins from the Hittites right up to Classical Greece and Rome. For thousands of years people have lived on these fertile alluvial plains in the Taurus foreland, the legacy of the "rivers of Paradise", as the Arabian geographers called the Seyhan and the Ceyhan.
