Harran, East Turkey Videos

Added: Nov 18, 2008

From: vladamikulec

Duration: 4:35

From our trip around Turkey, summer 2004.Harran, also known as Carrhae, is a district of Şanlıurfa Province in the southeast of Turkey. A very ancient city which was a major Mesopotamian commercial, cultural, and religious center, Harran is a valuable archaeological site. It is often identified as the place in which Abraham lived before he reached Canaan.Harran traded, among others, with Tyre one of its specialities was the odoriferous gum derived from the stobrum tree. The city was the chief home of the Mesopotamian moon-god Sin, under the Babylonians and even into Roman times. Carrhae is a defunct ancient town on the site; it gave its name to the Roman-era Battle of Carrhae versus the Parthian Empire.The district is near the border with Syria, 24 miles (44 kilometres) southeast of the city of Şanlıurfa, the former Edessa, at the end of a long straight road across the hot plain of Harran. The present ruins are from Roman, Sabian, and Islamic times. T. E. Lawrence surveyed the site, and an Anglo-Turkish excavation was begun in 1951, ending in 1956 with the death of D. S. Rice.In its prime Harran was a major Mesopotamian city which controlled the point where the road from Damascus joins the highway between Nineveh and Carchemish. This location gave Harran strategic value from an early date. It is frequently mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions as early as the time of Tiglath-Pileser I, about 1100 BC, under the name Harranu (Akkadian harrānu, "road, path, journey"). After the Suppiluliuma I-Shattiwaza treaty, Harran was burned by a Hittite army under Piyashshili in the course of the conquest of Mitanni.Sacked in 763 BCE, Harran was restored under the Assyrian ruler Sargon II. It became the headquarters for the Assyrians after the fall of their capital Nineveh in 612 BCE and their defeat to a coalition of Babylonians and Egyptians in the Battle of Carchemish in 609 BCE.Sin's temple was rebuilt by several kings, among them Assur-bani-pal and Nabonidus. Herodian mentions the town as possessing in his day a temple of the moon.At the beginning of the Islamic period Harran was located in the land of the Mudar tribe (Diyar Mudar), the western part of northern Mesopotamia (Jazira). Along with ar-Ruha' (Şanlıurfa) and Ar-Raqqah it was one of the main cities in the region. During the reign of the Umayyad caliph Marwan II Harran became the seat of the caliphal government of the Islamic empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia.It was allegedly the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun passing through Harran on his way to a campaign against Byzantium who forced the Harranians to convert to either one of the 'religions of the book', meaning Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The people of Harran identified themselves with the Sabians in order to fall under the protection of Islam. Sabians were mentioned in the Qur'an, but those were a group of Gnostic Mandaeans living in southern Iraq who were extinct at the time of al-Ma'mun. The relationship of the Harranian Sabians to the ones mentioned in the Qur'an is a matter of disspute.

Channel: Travel

Tags: abraham  carrhae  harran  jazira  mesopotamia  sanli  sanliurfa  turkey  türkiye  urfa  Şanlıurfa 

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