Malatya

Malatya is a city in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey and the capital of Malatya Province. The city has been a human settlement for thousands of years.

In Hittite, melid or milit means "honey", offering a possible etymology for the name, which was mentioned in the contemporary sources of the time under several variations.

Strabo says that the city was known "to the ancients" as Melitene, a name adopted by the Romans following Roman expansion into the east. According to Strabo, the inhabitants of Melitene shared with the nearby Cappadocians and Cataonians the same language and culture.