Nesa

Under the name Neša, the mound now called Kültepe in Kayseri province served briefly as the capital of an early Anatolian kingdom, seized by the ruler Anitta after he crushed a local revolt in the early second millennium BC. The kingdom centered on Neša flourished for roughly two centuries before a later ruler, Labarna, took the throne name Hattusili and shifted the center of power to Hattusa, beginning what historians recognize as the Hittite kingdom proper. Neša's lasting legacy, however, is linguistic: the Hittites' own language was called Nesili, meaning the language of Neša, and tablets from the site preserve the earliest known written record of a definitively Indo-European language, dated to around the twentieth century BC. Though the Hittite capital later moved elsewhere, Neša's brief role as a royal seat, and its place in naming the Hittite language itself, make the site a foundational point of reference for the earliest chapters of Anatolian history.