The Anatolians were a group of distinct Indo-European peoples who spoke the Anatolianlanguages and shared a common culture. 
The Hittites, who established an extensive empire in the Middle East in the 2nd millennium BC, are by far the best known members of the Anatolian group. Following the Bronze Age collapse, the lands of the Anatolian peoples were invaded with great frequency by a number of peoples and empires: the Phrygians, Bithynians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Galatian Celts, Romans and Oghuz Turks. Many of these invaders settled in Anatolia, in some cases causing the extinction of the Anatolian languages. By the Middle Ages, all the Anatolian languages (and the cultures accompanying them) were extinct, although there may be lingering influences on the modern inhabitants of Anatolia, most notably Armenians.