A piece of land around the city of Adıyaman in south-eastern Anatolia contained the Kingdom of Commagene during Roman times. The region consists of high plateaus and mountains of over 2,000 meters in elevation separated by deep valleys through which tributaries of the Euphrates River flow. The historian Strabo described the region as a small district with a natural fortress at Samosata and that it was exceedingly fertile. Currently, aside from Nemrut Dag at 2,150 meters in altitude there is the Atatürk Dam which was expected to augment the economy, but in the process has unfortunately created a 800 square kilometer lake which has buried hundreds of historic sites of antiquity under its waters forever. Samosata, the first capital of the Commagene Kingdom was one of the first of these remarkable historical sites to be lost to the rising waters created by this dam.

Mount Nemrut (Turkish: Nemrut Dağı) is a 2,134 meter or 7,000 foot high mountain in southeastern Turkey with large statues situated around the remains of a hiecothesion built by Antiochos I of Commagene. Hiecothesion - (from Greek hieros = sacred and thesis = place). Antiochos deemed himself worthy of god-like status and so ordered the building of a temple and funerary mound in his own honour. Its size and location was a reflection of his ego and thoughts about his immortality. He declared that when he died his spirit would join the god Zeus in heaven. But the huge statues of Antiochos and the gods are all that remain of his reign. The remarkable site is assumed to be a royal tomb from the 1^st century BC first discovered by a German Captain named Helmuth von Molke in 1835. But it was not until 1881 that another German engineer named Karl Sester made it generally known when he was in the area investigating transportation routes for the Ottoman government.