by
Damien F. Mackey
For Urfa, rather than the Ur in Sumer,
was clearly (and also according to traditions),
the biblical “Ur of the Chaldees”,
the original home of Abram (Abraham).
1. Karaka Dağ
This location is where, apparently, it all began after the great Noachic Flood.
Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K. White have argued most persuasively in favour of the mountain, Karaka Dağ (Karacadağ), being the mountain of the Ark’s landing:
JOURNAL OF CREATION 35(3) 2021 | https://dl0.creation.com/articles/p149/c14993/j35_3_50-63.pdf
A Candidate Site for Noah’s Ark, Altar, and Tomb
(2) (PDF) A Candidate Site for Noah's Ark, Altar, and Tomb. | Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K White - Academia.edu
It was the beginning (anew) of the Neolithic Age, wheat cultivation, animal husbandry, and – importantly in the case of Noah (cf. Genesis 9:20-21) – viniculture. “Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent”.
We read about the beginnings of farming early, for instance, in Kenneth and Darrell’s must-read article: https://creation.com/karaca-dag
We would expect to find the landing site of the Ark near the centre of the oldest post-diluvial distribution of humans and domesticated plants. The site presented in this paper lies upon a mountain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at the centre of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) Culture.
This mountain, Karaca Dag, is where the genetic ancestor of all domesticated Einkorn wheat was found by the Max Planck Institute.1 The other seven founder crops of the Neolithic Revolution all have this mountain near the centre of their wild range.2 This was so exciting that even the LA Times remarked how unusual it is that all of the early agriculture crops appear to have been domesticated in the same location:
“The researchers reported that the wheat was first cultivated near the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey, where chickpeas and bitter vetch also originated. Bread wheat—the most valuable single crop in the modern world—grapes and olives were domesticated nearby, as were sheep, pigs, goats and cattle.”3 ….
[End of quotes]
Karaca Dağ lies apparently just 60 miles northeast of the now famous Göbekli Tepe.
2. Göbekli Tepe
The extraordinary site of Göbekli Tepe must have been one of the first - if not the first - settlement for humanity after its coming away from the mountain - though I cannot accept the inflated evolutionary dates for this site of 10,000 BC, or older.
We read about the site at, for instance:
https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/entry-6007.html
• Gobekli Tepe — 10 kilometers from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey — is the home of what some have described as the world’s oldest temple, one that perhaps predates villages.
• Dated to 11,000 years ago, 6,000 years older than Stonehenge and and 5,000 years older than the first Egyptian pyramids, it sits on the summit of a hill and consists of megaliths carved with images. It was built by a mysterious group of hunter-gatherers millennia before metal tools or even pottery were invented. [Source: Andrew Curry, Smithsonian magazine, November 2008]
• Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh) sits in the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent. Describing the main excavation site Andrew Curry wrote in Smithsonian magazine, “In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside , are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar lay out: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars towers 16 feet and...weighs between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillar’s broad side.”
• The one acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. Thus far penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys have revealed 16 other megaliths rings buried over 22 acres. In addition to the megaliths archaeologists have found elaborate terrazzo floors, ceremonial buildings, stone buildings with hearths. What is unusual about the megaliths is that they were raised and buried. The images in the megaliths are difficult to interpret as they were made 6,000 years before the invention of writing, which is more time than has elapsed since the invention of writing and today.
• The columns of Gobekli Tepe contain images of birds caught in a net, oxen, foxes, cats and turtles. In some cases images of people are intermixed with the animals and the animals are presented in a non threatening. But the majority of the images are of menacing creature such as snakes, lions, scorpions and spiders, Numerous animal bones have been found at Gobekli Tepe, all of them wild. Most come from gazelles. Other are from wild boars, wild sheep, red deer and a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. Evidence from other sites in the region indicate that sheep, cattle and pigs were domesticated in the area within 1,000 years after Gobekli Tepe was built. The first evidence of wheat farming, also from nearby, dates to 500 years before it was constructed.
• Gobekli Tepe (meaning “Belly Hill” in Turkish) is being excavated by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute.
The site was first examined in a cursory manner by University of Chicago and University of Istanbul anthropologists in the 1960s as part of a sweeping survey of the area and dismissed as nothing more than a medieval cemetery after uncovering only a few limestone slabs. In 1994, after reading the University of Chicago description, Schmidt decided to take a look himself. He was immediately impressed by what he saw and taken by the rounded, almost made-made shape of the hill itself. Schmidt returned the next year with five colleagues and uncovered the first megaliths. ….
[End of quote]
3. Urfa
Following what I think could well be the progression of primary cultural modern man, we come next to Urfa (Sanliurfa). We read above that Göbekli Tepe was: “… 10 kilometers from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey …”.
We are now in the territory of “Shinar” (as we shall find in 4.), this particular region also being known as the land “of the Chaldees”.
For Urfa, rather than the Ur in Sumer, was clearly (and also according to traditions), the biblical “Ur of the Chaldees”, the original home of Abram (Abraham).
Urfa | Buildings | EMPORIS
URFA, ancient EDESSA, is - according to Biblical accounts - the first city in the world that was found after the Great Flood which destroyed humanity. HARRAN, where Prophet ABRAHAM lived for several years after leaving the ancient city of Ur, is a district of Urfa.
The following article by Steven Anderson grapples with the problem, whilst noting that an Islamic tradition, for example, holds Urfa to have been the home of Abraham:
https://truthonlybible.com/2015/02/13/ur-of-the-chaldees-abrahams-original-home/
Ur of the Chaldees: Abraham’s original home
13FridayFEB 2015
Genesis 11:28-31 identifies Abraham’s original hometown as “Ur of the Chaldees,” or “Ur of the Chaldeans.” Sometime during Abraham’s adult life, probably while he was already about seventy years old, his father Terah moved the family clan to the city of Haran in northern Syria as the first step in a planned migration to the land of Canaan. Terah himself did not complete the journey; he died while the family was living in Haran. When Abraham was seventy-five years old, he received a personal call from God to migrate to Canaan (Gen 12:1-3). This caused a division in the family clan: Abraham’s nephew Lot went with him to Canaan, while the rest of Abraham’s family stayed in the area of Haran, where Abraham’s relatives are found living in later chapters of Genesis.
There are two ancient cities called “Ur” that are known from archaeology. By far the most famous is a city in southeastern Mesopotamia that was a great center of early civilization.
A second Ur, which was far less prominent, is called “Ur in Haran” by an ancient tablet from Ebla. Islamic tradition identifies Shanliurfa, which is 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Haran, as Abraham’s original home. This city was refounded in the Hellenistic period as Edessa, and later became the center of the Syriac Christian community.
Although some scholars identify Ur of the Chaldees with the northern city of Ur, the arguments in favor of the southern location are compelling. In Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, he says that Abraham’s original home was in “the land of the Chaldeans” (Acts 7:4), a term which is used by other biblical writers to refer to southern Mesopotamia (e.g., Isa 23:13; Jer 25:12; Ezek 12:13) [sic].
It seems that the author of Genesis intended to specify the southern location of Ur by identifying it as the one that is in the land of the Chaldeans. Stephen says that Abraham had to leave the land of the Chaldeans in order to travel to Haran (Acts 7:4), whereas the reference to the northern Ur as “Ur in Haran” shows that it already lay within the territory of Haran.
Stephen also indicates in Acts 7:2 that what he means by “Mesopotamia”—Abraham’s original home—is a different region than the region around Haran, since he says that Abraham lived in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran.
Abraham’s relatives are found in later chapters of Genesis to be living near Haran in northern Syria/Aram (now part of Turkey). However, as has already been noted, this does not mean that “Ur of the Chaldees” was in northern Syria, since Genesis 11:31-32 states that Terah had moved Abraham’s extended family to Haran prior to Abraham’s journey to the land of Canaan with Lot (Gen 12:5). Since Arameans dominated the region around Haran, the Bible calls Laban “the Aramean” (Gen 25:20; 31:20, 24), and portrays Laban as a speaker of the Aramaic language in Genesis 31:47. Deuteronomy 26:5 even calls Jacob an “Aramean” because of his twenty years spent with Laban in Paddan-aram (near Haran). But Jacob and Laban could not have been of Aramean descent, since they were descended from Shem’s son Arpachshad (Gen 11:10-26), whereas the Arameans were descended from Shem’s son Aram (Gen 10:22-23).
Some scholars argue that because Abraham seems to be culturally Semitic in the Genesis narratives, he must have been from the northern location of Ur, which was in Aramean territory, and not from the southern location of Ur, which was in Sumerian territory. ….
[End of quote]
4. Harran (Haran)
Harran, too, was closely situated to sites 1-3. For, as we read in the above article, Urfa “… is 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Haran …”.
Harran must also have been in the land of the Chaldees.
If Shinar were Babylonia (or Sumer), then archaeologists would long ago have discovered Nimrod’s lost city of Akkad in Shinar (Genesis 10:10).
They have not discovered Akkad to this day.
And I think that I have discovered Akkad as Ugarit (var. IKAT), a long, long way from Babylonia (or Sumer). See e.g. my article:
My road to Akkad
(5) My road to Akkad | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
According to my revision, which corrects the Chaldean list that contains duplications, Nebuchednezzar and his son, Belshazzar (cf. Baruch 1:11, 12; Daniel 5:18, 22) (Belshazzar also known as Evil-Merodach), were the same regal pair as, respectively, Nabonidus and his son, Belshazzar:
Aligning Neo-Babylonia with the Book of Daniel
(6) Aligning Neo-Babylonia with the Book of Daniel | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
Now, we all well know (or, if we don’t, see e.g. Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s The reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, 556-539 B.C., Yale UP, 1989) that this Nabonidus, king of Babylon, was an obsessive worshipper of the moon god, Sîn, in Harran, whose temple Nabonidus claimed to have restored.
Nabonidus, a Chaldean, may even have hailed from this region, Harran – at least his mother, Adad-guppi, is thought to have.
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