*** Welcome to piglix ***

Urha


Edessa (Ancient Greek: Ἔδεσσα; Arabic: الرهاar-Ruhā; Turkish: Şanlıurfa; Kurdish: Riha‎) was a city in Upper Mesopotamia, founded on an earlier site by Seleucus I Nicator ca. 302 BC. It was also known as Antiochia on the Callirhoe from the 2nd century BC. It was the capital of the semi-independent kingdom of Osroene from c. 132 BC and fell under direct Roman rule in ca. 242. It became an important early centre of Syriac Christianity. It fell to the Muslim conquest in 638, was briefly retaken by Byzantium in 1031 and became the center of the Crusader state of the County of Edessa from 1098–1144. It fell to the Turkic Zengid dynasty in 1144 and was eventually absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in 1517. The modern name of the city is Urfa and it is located in Şanlıurfa Province in the Southeast Anatolia Region of Turkey.

The earliest name of the city was Admaʾ (Aramaic: אדמא‎, also written Adme, Admi, Admum) recorded in Assyrian cuneiform in the seventh century BC. A Hellenistic settlement was founded on the location of the Syrian town by Seleucus I Nicator in 304 BC, named Edessa after the ancient capital of Macedonia, perhaps due to its abundant water, just like its Macedonian eponym.


...
Wikipedia

...