Zincirli Höyük is a settlement mound about ten kilometres north of İslahiye, west of the city of Gaziantep. It sits on the plain at the Beyhan pass, the east-west gap through the Amanos mountains, on the western edge of a small marsh. The ancient name was Sam'al, and an inscription of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon dated to 670 BC, recovered in the excavations here, is what confirms the identification.
Three thousand years ago this was a city of some forty hectares and a royal seat — one of the principal centres of the period that followed the collapse of the Hittite empire, when a group of states archaeologists call the Late Hittite or Syro-Hittite kingdoms took shape between southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria. Their capitals shared a layout: the administrative and religious buildings raised on a height inside a fortified citadel, and the city around it ringed by a double wall. Zincirli is a clear example of the pattern.
The place changed hands often enough to make its ruins a short course in regional history. In the early second millennium BC it lay within the Amorite kingdom of Yamhad, whose capital was Halab, today Aleppo; later it passed to the Hittites; after their empire fell it became the capital of the kingdom of Sam'al. Aramean rule began in 920 BC, and the reign of king Kilamuwa, from 832 to 810 BC, was the city's brightest stretch. The raid of Tiglath-Pileser III in 743 BC made Sam'al a vassal of Assyria, and by 725 BC it had been absorbed outright; excavation found that the palace of Bar-Raqab, one of its last kings, had burned.
The mound was first examined in 1883 by Osman Hamdi Bey, during his work in the Kommagene region. Excavations followed between 1888 and 1902, led first by Karl Humann and Robert Koldewey and then by Felix von Luschan. Many of the sculptures found were cut away from their stone blocks and taken to Berlin by Humann, with Osman Hamdi Bey's knowledge — which is why a visitor standing on the mound will find the reliefs of Sam'al easier to see in a German museum than here. The most systematic work on the site began in 2006, as the Neubauer Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Gaziantep as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3.2 °C in January to 28.1 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (103 mm) and lightest in August (5 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
