Şırnak as a province appears late — its recorded history emerges in the last Ottoman period — but the ground it covers has a past reaching back into prehistory. Because there have been few archaeological excavations here, that past is hard to know in any detail.
The states that ruled were mostly those centred on Mesopotamia and Iran: the Assyrians, the Persians and the Sasanians, and after them the Roman and Byzantine empires.
Şırnak was conquered in the early Islamic period, and afterwards stayed under Umayyad, Abbasid, Seljuk, Ayyubid and Ottoman rule in turn. According to the Diyarbakır yearbook it was a kaza attached to the liva of Mardin in 1875 and 1876.
Its modern status is recent. In the Republic it was a district of Siirt province, and it became a province in its own right in 1990. Cizre castle, the Great Mosque and museum at Cizre, the Abdaliye medrese and the province's hot springs each have their own page below.
