Guide
The Tigris Bridge crosses the river in the Sur district of Diyarbakır. Because it has ten openings local people call it the Ten-Eyed Bridge, and because it stood on the old road to Silvan some sources call it the Silvan Bridge. It lies three kilometres from the city centre, outside the Mardin Gate, where the side road branching east meets the old Mardin road running on from Diyarbakır, and it joins the centre of the city to the town of Bağıvar and the villages around it.
When it was first built is disputed. The two-line inscription in floriated kufic between the arches and the parapet on the south front records that it was built in 1064–65, in the Marwanid period, in the time of Nizâmüddevle Nasr, by the judge Ebü'l-Hasan Abdülvâhid, and that the architect was a man named Ubeyd. Researchers agree, however, that this is a repair inscription and accept that the bridge was built far earlier. Some hold that a bridge stood on this spot in antiquity. C. Niebuhr, in his Voyages en Arabie, holds that the bridge existed before 1065; M. van Berchem and J. Strzygowski in their Amida, and A. Gabriel in his Voyages, hold that it is a pre-Islamic work, that repairs were begun in 742 by the caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik after it fell in a flood, and that the work was left unfinished when the caliph died. The bridge is thought to have been thrown down in whole or in part and rebuilt several times.
It belongs to the group of many-arched bridges with a level deck. It runs 172 metres long and varies in width: between 5.45 and 6.24 metres over the first five openings, and rising from the fifth to between 9.69 and 10.20 metres. The parapet stands eighty-five centimetres high at the ends and up to 155 in the middle, and the coping stones are thirty-one centimetres high, seventy-one wide and seven at the face.
The arches of openings one, two, six, seven, eight, nine and ten are close to one another in width and height, while those of the third, fourth and fifth are wider and higher. On the upstream side, facing north, are nine cutwaters with pyramidal caps.
