Guide
Harran is said to be the place named Haran in the Torah. Islamic historians tie its founding either to a grandson of Noah or to Aran, the brother of Abraham. The thirteenth-century historian Ibn Shaddad writes that Abraham lived in this town before going to Palestine, which is why Harran is also called Abraham's city, and he records that the house of Abraham, a masjid carrying his name and a stone he leaned on while sitting were all to be found there.
The firmest knowledge comes from excavation and from written records. The name first appears as Har-ra-na or Ha-ra-na on cuneiform tablets of the early second millennium BC found at Kültepe and Mari, and as Ha-ra-na in the Ebla tablets of northern Syria. Hittite tablets of the mid-second millennium record a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni witnessed by the moon god and the sun god of Harran.
The town sits where the trade routes running out of northern Mesopotamia toward the west and north-west cross, which made it a regular stop for the Assyrian merchants trading with Anatolia. Goods moved through Harran in both directions for thousands of years, and the wealth and the depth of culture there followed from that traffic.
Harran was known above all as a centre of the old Mesopotamian religion in which the moon, the sun and the planets were held sacred — which is also why astronomy advanced so far here. While Urfa became one of the major centres of Christianity, this older belief carried on at Harran, as it had since Assyrian, Babylonian and Hittite times, into the eleventh century AD.
