Urhoy

The Chronicle of Urhoy in syriac/aramaic:

Urhoy is situated in southeastern Turkey in the plain lying between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. According to the world chronicle of Bar Hebraeus, the brilliant scholar of the Arameans, this city was built in the days of Henoch and belongs to the first 180 cities of the world.
Its aramaic name derives from the name of the aramaic tribe Ru-ua, which is mentioned in assyrian scriptures.
To the Greeks it was known Orrhoe, but they changed it to Edessa when the city was refounded as a military settlement in the 3th century B.C.
In the middle of the 2th century B.C. the Aramean principality of the Abgars arose here, serving as a buffer state between the Persian East and the Roman West. Urhoy, as the capital of the principality Osrhoene, became a major centre of Aramean culture. Among the prominent scholars of Urhoy special mention is due to Bardaisan (154-222), the philosopher and contemporary of King Abgar IX.
Ephraem the of Nisibis, the most famous Christian writer, whose hymns are still being sung in liturgy, had to flee from his home town Nisibis in 363 and move his celebrated school to Urhoy, where he passed away in 373. This school had a first-rate reputation in the Orient and many remarkable scholars well-known both in the East and in the West succeeded in graduating there. Science prospered in Urhoy even in the Middle Ages. The theory of the astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) for example was treated by a bishop from Urhoy in the 10th century in his book called "The Cause of all Causes".
In 638 it was captured by the Arabs, under whose rule it played the role of a frontier city in wars with the byzantines. But the town remained predominantly Aramean. Thereafter Urhoy experienced many changes of rule. Arameans continued to live there during the Ottoman rule, when the town's name was pronounced "Urfa".
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the number of Arameans in Urhoy dwindled steadily. After the genocide of 1915 during the government of the Young Turks against the Arameans and Armenians many of the town's Arameans settled in Aleppo in Syria, where they formed a separate community, that of the "Urhoye". The very children of this land, who had been living there since time immemorial, were forced to deny their home and leave. Thus, hardly any Aramean remained on this our native soul.
Today Urhoy has become an exclusively muslim city.

The city's monuments include the two columns with Corinthian capitals situated on one of the hills overlooking the town. On the east side of the columns we can see some Estrangelo Syriac-Aramaic inscriptions. The translation of the inscriptions runs as follows:
"I Aftuha, son of Barsamyo, an army commander, built this column and the statue on it for My Mistress the Queen Shalmeth, the daughter of the prime minister Manu, the wife of (King Manu)."
This inscription gives us an insight into the Aramean Kingdom of Osrhoene.