Harpoot

Harpoot (Harput) or Kharberd (Խարբերդ) is an ancient town located in the Elazığ Province of Turkey. It now forms a small district of the city of Elazığ. In the late Ottoman period, it fell under the Mamuret-ul-Aziz Vilayet (also known as the Harput Vilayet). Artifacts from around 2000 BC have been found in the area. The town is famous for its Harput Castle, and incorporates a museum, old mosques, a church, and the Buzluk (Ice) Cave. Harput is about from Istanbul. Harput was a largely Armenian populated region in medieval times and had a significant Armenian population until the Armenian genocide. By the 20th century, Harput had been absorbed into Mezre (renamed Elazığ in 1937), a town on the plain below Harput that significantly grew in size in the 19th century. Kharberd was first interpreted as consisting of the Armenian words kʻar ("rock") and berd ("castle, fortress"), as if meaning "a fortress surrounded by rock faces." Others have connected the name with a Hurrian word, har/khar, meaning "path" or "road." Nicholas Adontz proposed a connection with Kharta, a city mentioned in Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions, putatively having developed into Khartberd and later Kharberd. Another proposed etymology connects it with the name of a Hittite and Hurrian goddess. Kharbed is sometimes identified with Hoṛeberd, a fortress in the Antzitene canton of the province of Sophene of the Kingdom of Armenia; according to this view, Kharberd is a corrupted form of the name Hoṛeberd (with the proposed development Hoṛeberd-Khoreberd-Kharberd). Arabic sources referred to Kharberd as Khartbirt or as Hisn Ziyad, from the Syriac Hesna d-Ziyad, meaning "the fortress of Ziyad." The medieval geographer Al-Dimashqi wrote that Khartbirt was the name of the city, while Hisn Ziyad referred to the ancient citadel. Harput is located on a hilltop above a rich, fertile plain historically dotted with villages, about 14 km away from the left bank of the Murat River. To its southeast is Lake Hazar (previously known as Gölcük in Turkish and Tsovkʻ in Armenian), the source of the Tigris River.