Batman is the youngest of the nine provinces of the GAP region in south-eastern Anatolia. It was founded in the basin between the Tigris and its tributaries the Batman and Garzan streams, and opened to settlement beside the road that links eastern and south-eastern Anatolia to the Middle East.
Until the early 1940s it was a village called İluh. Oil was found on the Raman mountains that ring the village to the south, and after that İluh grew fast. A refinery, the side industries that process petroleum products and the social facilities built alongside them changed the face of the village all at once.
The village itself was older than any of that. İluh, which appears in historical sources as Eyluh or Eyluhi, was built on and around a hill rising from a flat plain — and that hill is a mound whose past runs back thousands of years. Because its top and its surroundings have been open to settlement for so many years, an excavation that would reveal its history is not possible for the time being.
