Erbil's citadel crowns one of the world's oldest lived-in cities
Human settlement at Erbil may reach the fifth millennium BC, and King Shulgi of Ur already named Urbilum. The Ottoman-period fort still tops the tell at the centre of today's Kurdistan Region capital, inscribed a World Heritage Site in July twenty fourteen.
Known as Hawler in Kurdish and Arbela in classical Greek and Latin, the city sits on a plain beneath the mountains yet long linked Baghdad to Mosul as a trading stop. Early mentions include Ebla messengers visiting Irbilum around twenty-three hundred BC and Amar-Sin sacking Urbilum about nineteen seventy-five BC. Gutian Erridupizir took it in twenty-one fifty BC; later it passed through Middle and Neo-Assyrian control, Median and Achaemenid hands, and for a stretch was Adiabene's royal seat from roughly the mid-100s BC into the early 100s AD, when Queen Helena's family famously embraced Judaism.
Alexander defeated Darius III at Gaugamela in three hundred thirty-one BC roughly one hundred kilometres west, after which Darius fled into the city—hence the loose label Battle of Arbela. Christianity spread from the first to fourth centuries, with Pkidha remembered as first bishop around one hundred four AD, while older Mesopotamian cults lingered into the tenth century. Ishtar of Arbela had been the ancient patron. Medieval rule rotated through Seljuks, Zengids, Begtegenids such as Saladin's general Gokbori, Mongols after twelve fifty-eight, and later Soran and Ottoman masters until British wartime victory.
Karel Novacek's twenty oh six sounding found pottery from Neolithic through Iron Age on the tell's western slope, though heavy occupation has blocked a full dig. An eighty-hectare Early Bronze Age site at Tell Baqrta nearby joins the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey begun in twenty twelve. The archaeological museum holds a large pre-Islamic Mesopotamian collection, and the city was Arab Tourism Capital for twenty fourteen. By twenty twenty some four hundred fifty thousand refugees had settled in the metro area since two thousand three. Continuity, not emptiness, is the citadel's point.
Source: Erbil
