Urfa has been the busiest and most important of the places where east meets west since ancient times. It sat on a knot in the old road system that tied the two worlds together for trade and for culture, and that position is what allowed a whole cluster of cities — Harran, Urfa, Suruç, Birecik, Samsat, Raqqa — to reach a high level of civilisation here. When most of them were founded is not known.
Two great roads explain the traffic. One ran from the south-east to the north-west along the foot of the Zagros and down the Tigris; in the Neo-Assyrian period it was called the King's Road. The other came up from southern Mesopotamia along the Tigris, reached Sincar by way of Mosul, went on to Nisibis — modern Nusaybin — and through Ra's al-Ayn onto the Harran plain, then crossed the Euphrates at Carchemish and split north-west and south-west.
