Museum of Anatolian Civilizations

Push through the door and the street noise drops away behind you. The air inside is cool and dry, the way thick stone rooms stay cool in summer. Light comes down from small windows set high in the domes. It lands in pale patches on the polished floor. You will hear footsteps, a low murmur of voices, and the occasional camera click. Take a moment before you look at anything. This building sold cloth and spices for centuries before it held a single museum case.

You are standing inside an Ottoman bedesten — a covered market hall built for storing and trading valuable goods. It went up in the fifteenth century, on the slope just below the castle. Beside it stands a han, an inn where merchants lodged with their animals. Fire and neglect eventually reduced both buildings to shells. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, the state chose these ruins to house the country's ancient collections. The restoration work stretched across decades.

The plan is simple once you know it. Walk the outer galleries in a loop and you move forward through time. Stone Age hunters come first, then farmers, then metalworkers, then empires. The central domed hall holds the heaviest pieces — carved stone panels that once faced the walls of Hittite cities. If you have limited time, do the loop first and save the central hall for last. That way the sculpture arrives as a conclusion rather than an interruption.

The Neolithic cases hold material from Çatalhöyük, a farming town on the Konya plain. People there lived in mud brick houses packed tightly together. There were no streets. Residents climbed across the roofs and dropped into their homes through a hole with a ladder. They buried their dead under the floors of their own houses. Look for the small seated figure with rolls of flesh and two animals at her sides. She is often called a mother goddess. Archaeologists still argue about what she meant.

One wall painting from the same town deserves a long look. It shows a grid of boxes, like houses seen from above, with a shape above them that has often been read as an erupting mountain. Some researchers call this the earliest known map. Others say the boxes are simply a pattern and the mountain is a leopard skin. Nobody can settle it. Stand in front of it and decide for yourself which reading feels more convincing. Either way, someone painted it on a wall about 9,000 years ago.

In the Bronze Age rooms, look for the openwork bronze discs from the tombs at Alacahöyük. Stags and bulls stand inside circles crossed by bars, with small rings that may have rattled. They were found in graves alongside gold and silver objects. Their exact use is unknown. Enlarged copies of these stags now stand on monuments around Ankara, which means you may have already passed one on your way here without recognising it. The design has become one of the standard emblems of Turkish archaeology.

Next comes a period that surprises most visitors. Roughly 4,000 years ago, merchants from the Assyrian city of Assur ran a trading network deep into Anatolia. Their main base was at Kültepe, near modern Kayseri. They brought tin and fine textiles by donkey caravan and carried silver and gold home. Their letters survive on clay tablets. Some of the tablets are still sealed inside clay envelopes, unopened, with the sender's stamp pressed into the outside.

The letters are not affairs of state. They complain about debts, late shipments and family quarrels. Wives write to husbands who have been away too long. Merchants argue about interest rates. These are the ordinary voices of people who lived before the Hittite Empire existed, preserved because clay survives fire better than paper survives anything. Very few museums let you stand this close to private correspondence from the second millennium before the common era.

The Hittites ruled central Anatolia from Hattusa, north east of here. In the central hall you will find lions, sphinxes and long relief panels carved in basalt and limestone. Kings appear in pointed shoes and rounded caps. Gods stand on the backs of animals. Some pieces come from Karkamış, near the modern Syrian border. Look closely at the carving of feet and hands — the sculptors used shallow, confident cuts, and the surfaces still show the marks of their tools.

After the Hittite collapse, the Phrygians rose in western Anatolia. Their material here comes largely from Gordion, where a huge earth mound covered a wooden burial chamber. Inside were bronze bowls, cauldrons with attachments shaped like heads, and wooden furniture inlaid with fine geometric patterns. The mound is often called the tomb of Midas. In truth the occupant has never been identified with certainty, and the date makes a relative more likely than the legendary king himself.

The last galleries belong to Urartu, a kingdom based around Lake Van. Urartian metalworkers made helmets, shields and belts covered with rows of animals and warriors. Downstairs, in the older parts of the building, a separate section holds Greek, Roman and Byzantine material found in and around Ankara. The museum's own reputation is not small either. In 1997 it was named European Museum of the Year, an award that put this converted market hall on a very short list.

When you leave, stop outside the door before you go down the hill. Look up at the castle walls above the roofline. Roman columns and Byzantine blocks are built into them, reused by whoever needed stone. Then look down at the modern city spreading across the plain. Everything you have just seen was made within a few hundred kilometres of this spot. The distance between the oldest object inside and the traffic below you is shorter than it feels.