Islam.—In the first decade of the next century Edessa was taken by Chosroes II., and a large part of the population transported to eastern Persia. Within a score of years it was recovered by the emperor Heraclius, who reviewed a large army under its walls. The prophet of Islam was now, however, building up his power in Arabia, and although Heraclius paid no heed to the letter demanding his adhesion which he received from Medina (628), and the deputation of fifteen Rahāwiyīn who paid homage in 630 were not Edessenes but South Arabians, a few years later (636?) Heraclius’s attempts, from Edessa as a centre, to effect an organized opposition to the victorious Arabs were defeated by Sa’d, and he fell back on Samosāta. The terms on which Edessa definitely passed into the hands of the Moslems (638) under Riyād are not certain (Balādhurī). As it now ceased to be a frontier city it lost in importance. In 668 occurred another destructive flood (Theophanes, p. 537), and in 678 an earthquake which destroyed part of the “old church,” which the caliph Mo‘āwiya I. is said to have repaired. To the latter part of the century belongs the activity of Edessa’s bishop Jacob, whose chronicle is unfortunately lost. It may have been the impulse given by the final supremacy of the caliphate to the long process which eventually substituted a new branch of Semitic speech for the Aramaic (which had now prevailed for a millennium and a half), that led Jacob to adopt the Greek vowel signs for use in Syriac. A century later Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785), author of a lost history, translated into Syriac “the two books of the poet Homer on the Conquest of the city of Ilion.” When the Bagdād caliphs lost control of their dominions, Edessa shared the fortunes of western Mesopotamia, changing with the rise and fall of Egyptian dynasties and Arab chieftains. In the 10th century al-Mas’ūdī, writing in the very year in which it happened, tells how the Mahommedan ruler of Edessa, with the permission of the caliph, purchased peace of the emperor Romanus Lecapenus by surrendering to him the napkin of Jesus of Nazareth, wherewith he had dried himself after his baptism. The translation of the Holy Icon of Christ from Edessa is commemorated on the 16th of August (Cal. Byzant). A few years later Ibn Ḥauḳal (978) estimates the number of churches in the city at more than 300, and al-Moḳaddasī (985) describes its cathedral, with vaulted ceiling covered with mosaics, as one of the four wonders of the world. In 1031 the emperor recovered Edessa; but in 1040 it fell into the hands of the Seljuks, whose progress had added a large element of Armenian refugees to the population of Osrhoëne. There is no reason, therefore, to discredit Maqrīzī’s statement that it was three brother architects from Edessa that the Armenian minister Badr al-Gamāli employed to build three of the fine city gates of Cairo (1087-1091). The empire soon recovered Edessa, but the resident made himself independent. Thoros applied for help to Baldwin, brother and successor of Godfrey of Bouillon in the First Crusade, who in 1098 took possession of the town and made it the capital of a Burgundian countship, which included Samosata and Sarūg’, and was for half a century the eastern bulwark of the kingdom of Jerusalem.[22] The local Armenian historian, however, Matthew of Edessa, tells of oppression, decrease of population, ruin of churches, neglect of agriculture. With the campaign of Maudud in 1110 fortune began to favour the Moslems. Edessa had to endure siege after siege. Finally, in 1144 it was stormed, Matthew being among the slain, by ‘Imād ud-Dīn Zengī, ruler of Mosul, under Joscelin II., an achievement celebrated as “the conquest of conquests,” for laying the responsibility of which not on God but on the absence of the Frankish troops, an Edessan monk, John, bishop of Ḥarrān (d. 1165), brought down upon himself the whole bench of bishops. Edessa suffered still more in 1146 after an attempt to recover it. Churches were now turned into mosques. The consternation produced in Europe by the news of its fate led to “the Second Crusade.” In 1182 it fell to Saladin, whose nephew recovered it when it had temporarily passed (1234) to the sultan of Rūm; but the “Eye of Mesopotamia” never recovered the brilliance of earlier days. The names it contributed to Arabic literature are unimportant. By timely surrender (1268) it escaped the sufferings inflicted by Hūlākū and his Monguls on Sarū’g (Barhebraeus, Chron. Arab., Beirūt ed., 486). Mostaufī describes a great cupola of finely worked stone still standing by a court over a hundred yards square (1340). Ali b. Yazd in his account of the campaigns of Tīmūr, who reduced Mesopotamia in 1393, still calls the city (1425) Ruhā. In 1637, when Amurath IV. conquered Bagdād and annexed Mesopotamia, it passed finally into the hands of the Turks, by whom it is called Urfa.
The Modern Town.—Urfa lies north-east of the Nimrud Dagh. It is surrounded by a wall, strengthened by square towers at distances of 18-20 steps, probably dating in its present condition from medieval Mahommedan times. On a height in a corner towards the west, overtopping the town by 100-200 ft., are the remains of the old citadel, and the two famous Corinthian columns[23] known as “the Throne of Nimrūd.” In the hollow between this height and the town rise two springs which form ponds, the farther removed of which from the citadel is known as Birket al-Khalīl, doubtless the Callirrhoe of the classical writers, and contains the sacred fish, estimated by J.S. Buckingham at 20,000, and the nearer as ‘Ain Zalkha (i.e. Zuleikha, the wife of Potiphar). On the north edge of the Birket al-Khalīl (see plan in Sachau, p. 197) is the great mosque of Abraham, the interior of which is described by J.S. Buckingham (Travels, pp. 108-110). Diagonally opposite the mosque is a house with a square tower, which is locally believed to occupy the place of the famous ancient school. The waters of the two pools make their way in a single stream southwards out of the town. The once dangerous stream Daiṣān (Σκιρτός) no longer flows southwards through the town, but encircles it on the north and east in the channel of the old moat. This stream, now called Kara Kuyun, and the other are exhausted in the irrigation of the gardens lying south-east of the town, except when fuller than usual, when they reach the Balīh. Not far east of the sacred pool is the largest building in the town, the recent Armenian Gregorian cathedral, whose American bells were first heard during Sachau’s visit in 1879. About the middle of the town is the largest mosque, Ulu ’Gamī (parts of it probably pre-Islamic), which probably occupies the site of the Christian church reckoned by the early Mahommedan writers as one of the wonders of the world. In the bazaar, which lies between the chief mosque and the sacred pool, and contains several streets, are displayed not only the native woollen stuffs, pottery and silver work, but also a considerable variety of European goods, especially cloth stuffs. The principal manufactures are fine cotton stuffs and yellow leather. The streets are of course narrow and winding; but the houses are well built of stone. The outskirts are occupied by melon gardens, vineyards and mulberry plantations. The fertile plain south of the town is noted for its wheat and fine pasture. The climate is healthy except in summer; the “Aleppo button” (see [Bagdad], vilayet), a painful boil, is common. The rocky heights south and west of the town, whence the building material is largely obtained, are full of natural and artificial caverns, once used as dwellings, cloisters and graves, where are most of the inscriptions published by Sachau, who also visited and describes (pp. 204-206) the Dēr Ya‘qūb, nearly two hours distant.
Urfa is the capital of a sanjak of the same name, in the vilāyet of Aleppo. The population was estimated by Olivier in 1796 at 20,000 to 24,000, by Buckingham at 50,000, by Chernik in 1873 at 40,000, by Sachau in 1879 at 50,000, in Baedeker’s Handbook in 1906 at 30,000. Vice-Consul Fitzmaurice said that before December 1895 it was close on 65,000, of whom about 20,000 were Armenian, 3000 or 4000 Jacobites, Syrian-Catholic, Greek-Catholic, Maronites and Jews, and the remaining 40,000 Turkish, Kurdian and Arab Mahommedans. Two barbarous massacres occurred on the 28th and 29th of October and the 28th and 29th of December 1895; 126 Armenian families were absolutely wiped out. He believes that 8000 Armenians perished in the second massacre. The Deutsche Orient-Mission has its chief seat in Urfa, and there have for years been American and French missions. The Germans have an orphanage with 300 Armenian children, a carpet factory and a medical station. The American school had some years ago 250 pupils.
Authorities.—Inscriptional: H. Pognon, Inscriptions sémitiques de la Syrie, de la Mésopotamie et de la région de Mossoul (1907, 1908); Sachau, “Edessenische Inschriften,” in Z.D.M.G. xxxvi. 142-167; F.C. Burkitt, “The Throne of Nimrod,” in P.S.B.A. xxviii. 149-155 (1906); J. Rendel Harris, The Cult of the Heavenly Twins (1906); Nöldeke, “Syrische Inschriften,” in Z.A. xxi. 151-161, 375-388 (1908). Literary: Ludwig Hallier, Untersuchungen über die Edessenische Chronik mit dem Syrischen Text (1892); F. Nau, Analyse des parties inédites de la chronique attribuée à Denys de Tell-maḥré (1898); J.-B. Chabot, Chronique de Denys de Tell-Maḥré, quatrième partie (1895); W. Wright, The Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite (1882); Bayer, Historia Osrhoena et Edessena (St Petersburg, 1784), collects the references in classical authors; for the coinage see references in von Gutschmid (see below). Discussions: A. von Gutschmid, “Untersuchungen über die Geschichte des Königreichs Osroëne” (in Mémoires de l’acad. imper. des sciences de St-Pétersb. vii. sér. tome 35, No. 1, 1887); L.-J. Tixeront, Les Origines de l’église d’Édesse et la légende d’Abgar (1888); R.A. Lipsius, Die Edessenische Abgarsage kritisch untersucht (1880); K.C.A. Matthes, Die Edess. Abgarsage auf ihre Fortbildung untersucht (1882); F. Nau, Une Biographie inédite de Bardesane l’astrologue (1897); Bardesane l’astrologue: le livre des Lois des Pays (1899); A. Hilgenfeld, Bardesanes, der letzte Gnostiker (1864); A.A. Bevan, “The Hymn of the Soul” (in Texts and Studies, 1897); F.C. Burkitt, Early Eastern Christianity (1904); J.R. Harris, The Dioscuri in Christian Legend (1903), and The Cult of the Heavenly Twins (1906); the histories of Rome, Persia, Crusades, Mongols, &c.; Rubens Duval, Histoire politique, religieuse et littéraire d’Édesse jusqu’à la première croisade (1892), a useful compilation reprinted from the Journ. As.; the excellent article by E. Meyer in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, 1933-1938. Topography: J.S. Buckingham, Travels in Mesopotamia (1827); E. Sachau, Reise in Syrien u. Mesopotamien (1883), 189-210; cf. Duval, op. cit. chap, i.; C. Ritter, Erdkunde, xi. 315-356. Map of town in Niebuhr, Voyage en Arabie, reproduced with modifications in Wright, Chron. Josh. Styl.; also a map in Reclus, Univ. Geog. ix. 232. Four pictures of the town in Burkitt, Early East. Christ.
(H. W. H.)
[1] So Appian, Syr. 57; cp. Steph. Byz., s.v. Εδεσσα: διὰ τὴν τῶν ὑδάτων ῥύμην.
[2] Steph. Byz., s.v. Βατναι.
[3] Dio, passim.
[4] Isidore Charac. 1 (Müller, Geog. Gr. Min., i. 246).