The story of Arzen

Modern scholars believe this may be the site of Tigranocerta, the ancient Armenian capital founded by Tigranes the Great. Arzen stood on the banks of the Garzan Su, the ancient Nicephorius, and its Pahlevi Persian name means "valuable". In Late Antiquity it was the capital of the district of Arzanene, a Syriac bishopric and a Sasanian border fortress in the Roman–Persian Wars.

In the peace of 297 the Sasanian emperor Narseh ceded it to Rome, but it returned to Sasanian control in 363. The bishopric is first attested around 410. After the Muslim conquests it briefly became the seat of an autonomous dynasty of emirs in the 9th century, before being devastated in the wars between Byzantium and the Hamdanids in the 10th. By the 12th century it lay abandoned and ruined. John George Taylor, British consul in Diyarbakir, visited and sketched the site in the early 1860s.

Today few traces survive, so walk the riverbank and imagine a frontier city that changed hands between empires.