Hakkâri sits where the southern and eastern ends of Türkiye meet, at the junction of the south-eastern Taurus and the Zagros range that runs along the Iraqi and Iranian border. It is a wide mountain region, with the Mesopotamian flats of the Erbil and Mosul plains to the south and the ancient Azerbaijani plateau to the north.
That terrain shaped its politics. The steepness and difficulty of the country made it hard for the various empires and states to bring the region under administration, and kept whatever dependence they imposed very shallow. Because of the same geography the people of the region organised themselves socio-politically into tribes.
It also thinned the record. Historical data on Hakkâri is quite limited for anything before at least the 10th century — partly because very little archaeological work has been done here, and partly because the isolation of the country meant that historians, travellers and geographers rarely came.
