This paper investigates how archaeology functioned in Turkey from the nineteenth century until the end of the 1930s. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman world, there raised an awareness to acknowledge the power of 'patrimony'. Amidst intense reforms to westernize the Empire, the archaeological artifacts were used as a means of European-ness. The Greek, Roman, and Byzantine past of the Ottoman lands were the focus of this era. The foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marked the start of a new project to create a modern nation-state out of a centuries old Islamic dynasty. This project rewrote the history of Turkish nation in relation with prehistoric civilization such as the Hittites and the Sumerians. Archaeology became the primary tool of the Republic to validate the renewed history.