Day 228: Şanliurfa

Nov 17 - It is a wet morning, with clouds and mist clinging to the urbanized hills. I leave the hotel to check out the situation for transport tomorrow. This involves walking to the Şanliurfa Museum, which is down a road that cuts through a huge cemetery. The museum grounds are an expanse of limestone blocks and walkways.

The museum building itself is huge, containing an archaeological building and one with all mosaics. Having seen so many mosaics already in Gaziantep, I go only to the archaeological part.

Human presence in Mesopotamia dates back through time, without interruption, to the paleolithic. This museum does an excellent job of segmenting that out, using archaeological finds along the upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys to illustrate the continuum of human advancement, from about 12,000 BCE to the Middle Ages.

One question I always have when being presented with evidence of human development in some specific location is: Why here and not over there? The museum sort of addresses this question at the entrance:

Sanliurfa and its regions have been host to such herbivore animals as mountain sheep, goat, gazelle, buffalo as well as a variety of different plants including fruits, roots, wild weeds, and nuts; making it a desirable region for hunter and gatherer societies. Before they were farmed, naturally occurring lentils and grains like barley and wheat were already existing as natural fields in this region. This naturally rich environment allowed societies that had not fully embraced agricultural production to adapt to a settled lifestyle and experiment with initial agricultural practices and to domesticate animals.

I would add to this by saying that while this explanation could apply to many places in the paleolithic world, the dry, thinly vegetated landscape has helped preserve ancient structures and articles, giving us a window we would never have in the tropics, where everything rots and crumbles away quickly.

One of the critical markers in human technological development was the invention of pottery. On its surface, it achieved much, merely by allowing foodstuffs and liquids to be stored in volume, and for extended periods of time. On a deeper level, it triggered a movement from hunter-gathering to agriculture, thus changed completely the trajectory of societal focus. Further inventions, like that of irrigation and animal domestication, allowed groups to move further out of the valleys themselves and into the areas I now see out the bus window as we travel across the plateau.

The Halat Culture (about 5,000 BCE) represents this pottery phase, from the early chalcolithic period (chalcolithic means ‘copper-stone’), meaning that by that time, people had developed ways to make copper into tools.

The museum has many great pieces from the (much later) Bronze and Iron ages.

The museum continues through the Iron Age, followed by a large presentation of Roman statues, ending with the Arab invasions and the Ottomans.

Back to the room to collect Janet and Odette. We go south from our hotel to the historic district.

One thing I am noticing here are the occasional snippets of Arabic in the conversations around us. Not much, but enough to stand out from everywhere west of here. An old man at a mosque asks me to take a picture of him with his cell phone, using the word ‘picture’ in Arabic to make the request.

So, this place requires some explanation. Abraham is one of those supremely important personages who appears in both the Bible and the Quran. It is thought that he was born in about 2,000 BCE. The question is where? The Bible does not say, only that Terah (a descendent of Noah) gives birth to him (Genesis 11:27). It does say, however, that his youngest brother Haran was born in a place called Ur of the Chaldeans, so the common logic has been that he was born there as well. This is despite the probability that the family was nomadic, hence not living in any fixed location.

Problem is, it isn’t clear where Ur of the Chaldeans is. It is commonly linked with the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. But Muslims argue that the name ‘Ur’ is a shortened version of ‘Urfa’. And, the Ur in Iraq only appears in records over a thousand years after the conjectured birth of Abraham. At any rate, the Bible says that Terah and her family lived in Harran for a number of years. Scholars seem to agree that Harran refers to a place of the same name known today, nearby Urfa. So, the inference, without any further evidence, is that Abraham was born somewhere nearby here.

The legend of his birth, which has always sounded extremely mythologized to me (like the birth of Cyrus the Great), is that his birth was foretold to King Nimrod by a soothsayer, and that he would someday destroy both the kingdom of Nimrod and his religion. So Nimrod went around killing all the children born at the foretold time. Abraham, however, was sequestered away in a cave (this cave, no less!) and stayed there for 15 years. Stepping even further into incredulity, he was supposedly there by himself as an infant, being suckled by a gazelle.

Of course the soothsayer was correct, as Abraham, once out of hiding, eventually made the journey to Israel and founded monotheism (which would destroy many an empire and pagan religion in time). The command from God for him to make this journey is recounted in numerous Biblical passages, many of them in Genesis.

Continuing the above conjectured history, Abraham survives and lives in Urfa for years. At one point, unsurprisingly (from a storytelling standpoint), he falls in love with Zeliha, daughter of that same King Nimrod. The king gets all upset with this and throws Abraham into a fire, which miraculously converts to a pool of water. The local version, however, says that after seeing Abraham could not be burned, Zeliha accepts Islam (in 2,000 BCE!) and Nimrod gets angry again, throwing her into a fire. She dies but the spot turns into the lake shown below, which fills with fish.

Take a walk though the market.