Tall Mahra

Tall Maḥrā was a small city of the central Balikh River valley, in what is now northern Syria, inhabited from the Hellenistic period until about the 13th century. It is identified with the 21-hectare tell now called Tall Shaykh Hasan, also romanized as Tell Sheikh Hasan. Karin Bartl did a survey of the site's ceramics in the 1990s, and the Syrian Antiquities Service also conducted excavations here by digging a few test trenches. Tall Mahra peaked under the Abbasid Caliphate, when it was the main town between Raqqa and Hisn Maslama on the way to Harran. It is best known as the birthplace of Dionysius I Telmaharoyo, the 9th-century Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch. The oldest pottery fragments found at Tall Mahra date from the Hellenistic period. Later, it formed a Christian settlement under the Byzantine Empire. The Late Roman/Byzantine settlement (from the 3rd/4th until 7th centuries) covered perhaps 7 ha. The only remains found from this period were two mud-brick walls, covered in lime plaster, under a street on the eastern side of the tell. These walls were probably also used during the Umayyad period. A few 7th-century Byzantine coins were also found at the site. Like other sites in the region, Tall Mahra underwent significant expansion during the Abbasid period. This was likely prompted by Harun al-Rashid moving his court to Raqqa in 796, which created a new demand for

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).