Citadel of Erbil
The Citadel of Erbil, locally called Qellat, is a tell or occupied mound, and the historical city centre of Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The citadel was added to the World Heritage List on 21 June 2014.
The earliest evidence for occupation of the citadel mound dates to the 5th millennium BC, and possibly earlier. It appears for the first time in historical sources in the Ebla tablets in modern Syria around 2000 BC, and gained particular importance during the Neo-Assyrian period. During the Sassanian period and the Abbasid Caliphate, Erbil was an important centre for Christianity. After the Mongols captured the citadel in 1258, the importance of Erbil declined. During the 20th century, the urban structure was significantly modified, as a result of which a number of houses and public buildings were destroyed.
The buildings on top of the tell stretch over a roughly oval area of occupying. The only religious structure that currently survives is the Mulla Afandi Mosque. The mound rises between from the surrounding plain.
History
Prehistory
The site of the citadel may have been occupied as early as the Neolithic period, as pottery fragments possibly dating to that period have been found on the slopes of the mound. Clear evidence for occupation comes from the Chalcolithic period, with sherds resembling pottery of the Ubaid and Uruk periods in the Jazira and southeastern Turkey, respectively. Given this evidence for early occupation, the citadel has been called the oldest continuously occupied town in the world.Earliest historical records
Erbil appears for the first time in literary sources around 2300 BC in the archives of Ebla. According to Giovanni Pettinato, it is mentioned in two tablets as Irbilum.The city was first largely under Sumerian domination from c. 3000 BC, until the rise of the Akkadian Empire which united all of the Akkadian Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia under one rule. Later, Erridupizir, king of Gutium, captured the city in 2200 BC.
At the end of the 3rd millennium BC, Erbil is mentioned in historical records of the Ur III period as Urbilum. King Shulgi destroyed Urbilum in his 43rd regnal year, and during the reign of his successor Amar-Sin, Urbilum was incorporated into the Ur III state. In the 18th century BC, Erbil appears in a list of cities that were conquered by Shamshi-Adad of Upper Mesopotamia and Dadusha of Eshnunna during their campaign against the land of Qabra. Shamshi-Adad installed garrisons in all the cities of the land of Urbil. During the 2nd millennium BC, Erbil was incorporated into Assyria. Erbil served as a point of departure for military campaigns toward the east.
From the Neo-Assyrian period to the Sassanids
Erbil was an important city during the Neo-Assyrian period. The city took part in the great revolt against Shamshi-Adad V that broke out over the succession of Shalmaneser III. During the Neo-Assyrian period, the name of the city was written as Arbi-Ilu, meaning 'Four Gods'. Erbil was an important religious centre that was compared with cities such as Babylon and Assur. Its goddess Ishtar of Erbil was one of the principal deities of Assyria, often named together with Ishtar of Nineveh. Her sanctuary was repaired by the kings Shalmaneser I, Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. Inscriptions from Assurbanipal record oracular dreams inspired by Ishtar of Erbil. Assurbanipal probably held court in Erbil during part of his reign and received there envoys from Rusa II of Urartu after the defeat of the Elamite ruler Teumman.After the end of the Assyrian Empire, Erbil was first controlled by the Medes and then incorporated into the Achaemenid Empire before it became part of the empire of Alexander the Great after the Battle of Gaugamela, which was fought near Erbil in 331 BC. Subsequently, after the partition of Alexander the Great's Empire by his generals, the city was called Arabella or Arbela and it was part of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire. After the 1st century BCE, the Roman and Parthian Empire fought over control of Erbil, or Arbira as it was known in that period. After the 1st century AD, Arbela became an important Christian center. During the Sassanid period, Erbil was the seat of a satrap. In 340 AD, Christians in Erbil were persecuted and in 358, the governor became a martyr after he converted to Christianity. A Nestorian school was founded in Erbil by the School of Nisibis in c. 521. During this period, Erbil was also the site of a Zoroastrian fire temple.
Muslim conquest until the Ottomans
Erbil was conquered by the Muslims in the 7th century. It remained an important Christian center until the 9th century, when the bishop of Erbil moved his seat to Mosul. In the middle of the 10th century, Erbil came under the rule of Hadhabani Kurds until 1063 when it was taken over by the Seljuk Turks. From the first half of the 12th century until 1233, Erbil was the seat of the Begteginids, a Turcoman dynasty that rose to prominence under the reign of Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul. In 1183, Zain ad-Din Yusuf, ruler of Erbil, shifted his allegiance to the Kurdish Ayyubid Sultanate. In 1190 when Zain ad-Din Yusuf died, his older brother Muzaffar al-Din Gökböri, who was previously governor of Edessa, became the new governor of Erbil. He created a lower town around the city on the citadel mound and founded hospitals and madrasahs. When Gökböri died in 1233 without an heir, control of Erbil shifted to the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir after he had besieged the city.Mongols
When the Mongols invaded the Near East in the 13th century, they attacked Erbil for the first time in 1237. They plundered the lower town but had to retreat before an approaching caliphal army and had to put off the capture of the citadel. After the fall of Baghdad to Hülegü and the Mongols in 1258, they returned to Erbil and were able to capture the citadel after a siege lasting six months. Hülegü then appointed a Christian governor to the town and there was an influx of Jacobite Christians, who were allowed to build a church.As time passed, persecutions of Christians, Jews and Buddhists throughout the Ilkhanate began in earnest in 1295 under Oïrat amir Nauruz. This manifested early on in the reign of the Ilkhan Ghazan. In 1297, after Ghazan had felt strong enough to overcome Nauruz' influence, he put a stop to the persecutions.
During the reign of the Ilkhan Öljeitü some of the Christian inhabitants retreated to the citadel to escape persecution. In the spring of 1310, the Malik. Despite Mar Yahballaha's best efforts to avert the impending doom, the citadel was at last taken by Ilkhanate troops on 1 July 1310, and all the defenders were massacred, as were all the Kurdish inhabitants of the lower town.
After Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, Erbil came under control of Soran emirate, a semi-independent Kurdish emirate under the Ottoman Empire. In the 18th century Baban Emirate took the city but it was retaken by Soran ruler Mir Muhammad Pasha of Rawanduz in 1822. The Soran emirate continued ruling over Erbil until it was retaken by the Ottoman Turks in 1851. Erbil became part of the Mosul Vilayet in Ottoman Empire until World War I, when the Ottomans were defeated by the British Empire. The town had approximately 3,200 inhabitants, including a sizeable Jewish minority.
Modern period
During the 20th century, the citadel witnessed significant urban and social changes. A high steel water tank was erected on the citadel in 1924, providing the inhabitants with purified water, but also causing water damage to the foundations of the buildings due to increased water seepage. The number of inhabitants gradually declined over the 20th century as the city at the foot of the citadel grew and wealthier inhabitants moved to larger, modern houses with gardens. In 1960, over 60 houses, a mosque, and a school were demolished to make way for a straight road connecting the southern gate with the northern gate. Some reconstruction works were carried out in 1979 on the citadel's southern gate and the hammam. In 2007, the remaining 840 families were evicted from the citadel as part of a large project to restore and preserve the historic character of the citadel. These families were offered financial compensation. One family was allowed to continue living on the citadel to ensure that there would be no break in the possible 8,000 years of continuous habitation of the site, and the government plans to have 50 families live in the citadel once its renovated. In 2004, the Kurdish Textile Museum opened its doors in a renovated mansion in the southeast quarter of the citadel.The Citadel and the Bazaar
The city of Erbil is defined by the central circular mound that is the citadel, 102,000 square metres of land raised 26 metres above the surrounding city, presumed to have been started in antiquity as a tell. Around and beneath it to the south sprawl a maze of alleyways where the ancient commercial heart of the city beats strongly to this day. The citadel dwellings still stand, although they are now vacated as part of the UNESCO development project to renovate the buildings. The market area below is thought to have been created in the time of Sultan Muzafferddin Kokberi. This period, the only time in its long history when Erbil flourished as an independent city state, also saw the creation of the Mudhafaria Minaret in downtown Erbil, and was also the time when the Muzafferddin madrassahs were founded.The area around the southern base of the citadel has received the attention of modern town planners, with the large open-air Lana market where once market stalls sold leather crafts now and replaced by a large modern shopping mall. The covered market, known as Qasariyah, still stands largely unchanged: A labyrinth of small alleyways protected from sun and rain by a latticework of corrugated iron. Beneath these eaves are the numerous shopkeepers selling wares largely imported from the Far East interspersed with craftsmen plying a trade they inherited from their forefathers in the late nineteenth century when the bazaar was restored: Jewellers, cobblers, carpenters, tinsmiths and butchers. Where possible, tradesmen gather alongside others who trade in the same wares, giving each alleyway a specialism such as the passageway towards the north-east corner where honey and dairy products are sold – yoghurts and cheeses piling the highly valued local honey. Another highly prized tradition is the creation of Klash shoes – an ancient uniquely Kurdish craft when white cloth is beaten on small anvils to create hardwearing footwear. These, and the traditional fabrics sold in the textile souk, are ever-popular in the run-up to the annual Newroz celebrations when the townspeople assume traditional attire.