Haran

HARAN. - A very ancient city of north-western Mesopotamia. It was called Harrānu by the Assyrians, Kāppai by the Greeks, Carrae or Carrhae by the Romans, and H. in the Vulgate. Situated on the river Balīh, it lay at the centre of the great arc that the Euphrates describes toward the Mediterranean, a day's journey south-east of Edessa, in a fertile region where the Assyrian kings loved to go hunting wild beasts and elephants.

The name of H. has a special fascination, because it evokes the history of the Patriarchs. Abraham (v.), having come from Ur, lived there for many years before setting out for Canaan (Gen. 11, 3 ff.; 12, 4 ff.); there took place the idyllic episodes of Rebecca and Rachel at the well of H., and the flight of Jacob (Gen. 24, 10; 27, 43; 28, 10; 29, 4).

Thanks to its geographical position, it was a great emporium and a junction of important trade routes coming from Asia Minor, from Assyria and Babylonia, from Syria and Phoenicia. The Assyrian name Harrānu, that is "road", which used to be written with a cuneiform sign representing a crossroads, is significant. It never had great political influence, but it owed its splendour to commerce and, no less, to its status as a great cult centre of the moon god, Sin, who possessed there the magnificent temple Ehulhul.

Since no excavations have ever been carried out at the site of H., its history is known only from the abundant literary sources. The origins of H. are unknown. In cuneiform documents H. is perhaps already mentioned in the tablets of the Assyrian merchants of Cappadocia (beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C.). A treaty of the 14th century B.C. between the king of Mitanni and the king of the Hittites shows that H. then belonged to the Kingdom of Mitanni. But afterwards (13th-11th centuries B.C.) it was under the dominion of the Assyrian Empire, in which it enjoyed certain privileges. As already the narratives of Genesis, so too the Assyrian documents of these times reveal the presence of numerous Aramaic tribes that pastured their flocks in the surroundings of the city. In the subsequent period of Aramaic dominion (11th-9th centuries B.C.) the sanctuary of Sin exercised ever more its influence over all Syria, so that, when "the fortress H." fell again under the impetus of Assyrian expansion (9th-7th centuries B.C.; cf. Is. 37, 12), it came to be the residence of an Assyrian governor, and Assyrian emperors did not disdain to be crowned in the temple of Sin or to consult its oracle. How much importance the Assyrians attributed to this city can be seen from the fact that after the destruction of Nineveh (612 B.C.) the last Assyrian king chose H. as his capital and sought to re-establish his kingdom from there; but in 610 H. and its temple were destroyed by the Medes. Only the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, a native of H. and probably a former priest of Sin, rebuilt the city and temple in 555, which seems to have existed from then on for a long time. Commerce suffered no harm from these political vicissitudes, because Ex. 27, 23 describes a lively traffic between H. and the Phoenician cities.

The crushing defeat that the Roman consul Crassus suffered at the hands of the Parthians near H. in 53 B.C. made the city for many centuries sadly famous among the Romans. Nor was its reputation improved when in 217 the emperor Caracalla, after a visit to the temple of H., was assassinated not far from the city. H. remained, in the centuries A.D., an essentially pagan city in which Christianity barely managed to maintain itself. The city, which had survived the conquests of the Persians, the Seleucids, the Romans and the Parthians, continued also to live on after the Arab conquest. Today, however, it is nothing but a small village, which still preserves the ancient name in the form Harrân.

Ernesto Vogt