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
Haran, the place in which
Abraham lived before he reached
Canaan.
Among
Harran's trading partners was Tyre
(Ezekiel 27:23). One of Harran's
specialties 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, and gave its name to
the
Battle of Carrhae (53 BC),
fought between the
Roman Republic and
the
Parthian Empire.
Harran's ruins date from Roman,
Sabian, and
Islamic Caliphate 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.
Ancient Harran
The
district is near the border with Syria
, 24 miles
(44 kilometers) southeast of the city of Şanlıurfa
, the former Edessa
, at the end of a long straight road across the hot
plain of Harran. 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
harrÄnu, "road, path; campaign, journey"). After the
Suppiluliuma I-
Shattiwaza treaty between the
Hittite Empire and
Mitanni, 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 served for two years as the headquarters
for the then–crumbling Assyrian Empire after the fall of its
capital Nineveh in 612
BCE.
Sin's temple was rebuilt by several kings, among them the Assyrian
Assur-bani-pal (7th century BCE) and
the Neo-Babylonian
Nabonidus (6th century
BCE).
Herodian (iv. 13, 7) mentions the
town as possessing in his day a temple of the moon.
Harran in scriptures
It is said that
Adam and Eve set foot
in Harran after they were expelled from the
Garden of Eden.
The
Hebrew Bible's
Book of Genesis (Genesis 11:31, 12:4-5)
identifies a place called Haran (also Harran, Charan, and Charran;
), where
Terah and his son
Abram, grandson
Lot and
Abram's wife
Sarai halted on their way from
Ur of the Chaldees to
Canaan. Some scholars identify the Biblical Haran
with Harran.
Genesis 27:43 makes
Haran the home of
Laban and connects
it with
Isaac and
Jacob:
Jacob spent 20 years in Haran working for his uncle Laban (cf.
Genesis 31:38&41). The place-name should not be confused with
Haran (Hebrew: הָרָן), Abraham's brother and
Lot's father — note that the two names are spelled differently in
the original Hebrew.
Islamic tradition also links Harran to
Aran, the brother
of Abraham. (cf. Genesis 11:26-32)
During the reign of King
Hezekiah of
Judah, Harran rebelled from the
Assyrians, who reconquered the city (
2
Kings 19:12;
Isaiah 37:12) and
deprived it of many privileges which king
Sargon II later restored.
Medes, Persians, Greeks and Romans
During the fall of the
Neo-Assyrian
Empire, Harran became the stronghold of its last king,
Ashur-uballit II, being besieged and
conquered by
Nabopolassar of Babylon in
609 BC.
Harran became part of Median Empire after the fall of Assyria, and
subsequently passed to the Persian
Achaemenid dynasty. The city
remained Persian until 331 BC, when the soldiers of the
Macedonian conqueror
Alexander the Great entered the
city.
After the
death of Alexander on June 11, 323 BC, the
city was contested by his successors: Perdiccas, Antigonus Monophthalmus, and
Eumenes visited the city, but eventually it
became part of the realm of Seleucus
I Nicator, of the Seleucid
Empire, and capital of a province called Osrhoene (the Greek rendering of the old name
Urhai
). For a century-and-a-half, the town
flourished, and it became independent when the
Parthian dynasty of Persia occupied
Babylonia. The Parthian and Seleucid kings were
both happy with a buffer state, and the dynasty of the
Arabian Abgarides, technically a vassal of the Parthian
"
king of kings", was to rule Osrhoene for
centuries.
In Roman times, Harran was known as Carrhae, and was the location
of the
Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC,
in which the Parthians, commanded by general
Surena, defeated a large Roman army under the command
of
Crassus, who was
killed.
Centuries later, the emperor
Caracalla was
murdered here at the instigation of
Macrinus (217). The emperor
Galerius was defeated nearby by the Parthians'
successors, the
Sassanid dynasty of
Persia, in 296 AD. The city remained under Persian control until
the fall of the Sassanids to the Arabs in 651 AD.
Christianity and Sabianism
Harran was a centre of
Christianity
from early on, the first place where purpose-built churches were
constructed openly. However although a bishop resided in the city,
many people of Harran retained their ancient pagan faith during the
Christian period, and thus the
Sabian
culture was born here in Harran.
Islamic Harran
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 dispute. and Harran is the place of birth for
Ibn Taymiyyah, the founder of
Salafi Islam.
Islam's first university
During the late 8th and 9th century Harran was a centre for
translating works of astronomy, philosophy, natural sciences and
medicine from
Greek to
Syriac by
Assyrians and thence to
Arabic, bringing the knowledge of the
classical world to the emerging
Arabic-speaking civilization in the south.
Baghdad
came to this work later than Harran. Many
important scholars of natural science, astronomy, and medicine
originate from Harran which were non-Arab and non-Islamic
Assyrians, including possibly the alchemist
Geber.
The end of the Sabians
In 1032 or 1033 the temple of the Sabians was destroyed and the
urban community extinguished by an uprising of the rural, starving
'
Alid-
Shiite population
and impoverished urban Muslim militias. In 1059-60 the temple was
rebuilt into a fortified residence of the
Numayrids, an Arab tribe assuming power in the
Diyar Mudar (western Jazira) during the 11th century. The
Zangid ruler
Nur al-Din
Mahmud transformed the residence into a strong fortress.
The Crusades
During the
Crusades, on May 7, 1104 a
decisive battle was fought in the
Balikh
river valley, commonly known as the
Battle of Harran. However, according to
Matthew of Edessa the actual
location of the battle lies two days away from Harran.
Albert of Aachen and Fulcher of Chartres locate the
battleground in the plain opposite to the city of ar-Raqqah
. During the battle,
Baldwin of Bourcq,
Count of Edessa, was captured by troops of
the
Great Seljuq Empire. After
his release Baldwin became
King of
Jerusalem.
At the end of 12th century Harran served together with ar-Raqqah as
a residence of
Kurdish Ayyubid princes. The Ayyubid ruler of the
Jazira,
Al-Adil I, again strengthened the
fortifications of the castle. In the 1260s the city was completely
destroyed and abandoned during the
Mongol invasions of Syria. The
father of the famous
Hanbalite scholar
Ibn Taymiyyah was a refugee from
Harran, settling in Damascus. The 13th century
Arab historian
Abu al-Fida
describes the city in ruins.
Ruins of the University at
Harran.
It was one of the main Ayyubid buildings of the city, built in
the classical revival style
Modern Harran
Harran is famous for its traditional
'beehive' adobe houses, constructed entirely
without wood. The design of these makes them cool inside (essential
in this part of the world) and is thought to have been unchanged
for at least 3,000 years. Some were still in use as dwellings until
the 1980s. However, those remaining today are strictly tourist
exhibits, while most of Harran's population lives in a newly built
small village about 2 kilometres away from the main site.
At the historical site the ruins of the city walls and
fortifications are still in place, with one city gate standing,
along with some other structures. Excavations of a nearby 4th
century BC burial mound continue under archaeologist Dr
Nurettin Yardımcı.
The new village is poor and life is hard in the hot weather on this
plain. The people here are ethnic
Arabs and
live by long-established traditions. It is believed that these
Arabs were settled here during the 18th century by the
Ottoman Empire. Typically families consist of
10-15 children. The women of the village are tattooed and dressed
in traditional
Bedouin cloths.
By the late 1980s the large plain of Harran had fallen into disuse
as the streams of Cüllab and Deysan, its original water-supply had
dried up. But the plain is irrigated by the recent
Southeastern Anatolia Project
and is becoming green again. Cotton and rice can now be
grown.
Politics
Sanliurfa
is represented by 11 congressmen in the parliament
. Following the elections in 2007, the names
of the legislators are: Abdulkadir Emin Önen, Abdurrahman Müfit
Yetkin, Çağla Aktemur Özyavuz, Eyyüp Cenap Gülpınar, Mustafa Kuş,
Ramazan Başak, Sabahattin Cevheri, Yahya Akman, Zülfükar İzol,
İbrahim Binici, and Seyit Eyyüpoğlu.
References
- Chwolsohn, Daniil Abramovic, Die Ssabier und der
Ssabismus, 2 vols. St. Petersburg, 1856. [Still a valuable
reference and collection of sources]
- Green, Tamara, The City of the Moon God: Religious
Traditions of Harran. Leiden, 1992.
- Heidemann, Stefan, Die Renaissance der Städte in Nordsyrien
und Nordmesopotamien: Städtische Entwicklung und wirtschaftliche
Bedingungen in ar-Raqqa und Harran von der beduinischen
Vorherrschaft bis zu den Seldschuken (Islamic History and
Civilization. Studies and Texts 40). Leiden, 2002 .
- Rice, David Storm, "Medieval Harran. Studies on Its Topography
and Monuments I", Anatolian Studies 2, 1952, pp.
36–84.
See also
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