Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

No one is sure when Urfa was originally settled.

Urfa

No one is sure when Urfa was originally settled. According to local tradition and the belief of some Muslims, it was the Biblical city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham. However, most biblical scholars and many archeologists and historians of the ancient Tigris and Euphrates region think that the Chaldean city of Ur Kasdim, now Tell el-Mukayyar in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, is Biblical Ur.

Seleucus I, a Macedonian officer under Alexander the Great, established an outpost in this already settled town for his newly formed kingdom in 303 B.C., twenty years after the death of Alexander. He named it Edessa after the city of the same name in Macedonia. By about 132 B.C. the dynasty he established, the Seleucid dynasty, collapsed and the city came under the control of the Abgar dynasty, a series of client kings for Parthia, very much the way Herod I and Herod Antipas were client kings of Israel under Roman control. In the years that followed the Abgar dynasty, which lasted for 350 years, Edessa fell under Armenian, Persian and Roman control. It would become part of Byzantine Empire. It repulsed the Persians in A.D. 544, but fell to Muslim Arabs in 639 not to be retaken until the First Crusades in 1098 by French forces under command of Baldwin of Boulogne, who would later become King Baldwin I of Jerusalem.