Karkamış


Karkamış, aka Kargamış is a town and district of Gaziantep Province in southeastern Turkey, next to the site of ancient Karkemish. The population of the town was 2,998 in 2010.
It is a border checkpoint on the road to Jarabulus in Syria. In 2004, 8,071 vehicles and 38,263 people passed the border checkpoint into Turkey while 8,795 vehicles and 35,474 people crossed it towards Syria.
The River Euphrates runs east of Karkamış southwards into Syria. At this place, a railway bridge of that was built between 1911-1913 by German engineers as part of the Istanbul-Baghdad Railway, crosses the river parallel to the border line.
One of the 21 dams of the Southeastern Anatolia Project, the Karkamış Dam and hydroelectric power station is located upstream from the border crossing of Euphrates.
In March 2011, the Turkish military base which included the ruins of Karkemish was cleared of mines. Archaeologists from Italy and Turkey began excavations, still ongoing, in the ancient town in September 2011.

History

The Municipality of Karkamış was established in 1961, before then having been assigned administratively under Nizip. At the time of the famous British Museum excavations at the nearby archaeological site lying to the East, Karkamış did not yet exist, only the railway station built by the Germans was already there, since the main village at that time was Jarabulus, now in Syria. After the Turkish War of Independence, a settlement was established around the railway station which finally came to be named after the famous nearby archaeological site.

Archaeological heritage

The ancient site of Karkemish is now an extensive set of ruins, located on the West bank of Euphrates River, about south-east of Gaziantep, Turkey and northeast of Aleppo, Syria. The site is crossed by the Syria–Turkey border. A Turkish military base has been built after 1920 on the Karkemish acropolis and Inner Town, and access to the acropolis is still restricted. Most of the Outer Town lies in Syrian territory.
and Leonard Woolley in Karkemish, Spring 1913
Karkemish has always been well known to scholars because of several references to it in the Bible and in Egyptian and Assyrian texts. However, its location was identified only in 1876 by George Smith.
The site was excavated by the British Museum, 1878-1881 by Patrick Henderson, 1911 by D. G. Hogarth and R. C. Thompson, and from 1912 to 1914 by C. L. Woolley, and T. E. Lawrence. Excavations were interrupted in 1914 by World War I, resumed in 1920 with Woolley and then ended with the Turkish War of Independence. These expeditions uncovered substantial remains of the Neo-Hittite and Neo-Assyrian periods, including defensive structures, temples, palaces, and numerous basalt statues and reliefs with Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Following the completion in March 2011 of mine clearing operations on the Turkish portion of the site, archaeological work was resumed in September 2011 by a Turco-Italian joint archaeological expedition under the direction of Prof. Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. In July 2019 an archaeological park has been opened at the site.