Arzen

Arzen
Fortress town
Sketch of the town's outline by John George Taylor, from his Travels in Kurdistan (1865)
Arzen
Coordinates: 37°58′26″N 41°23′05″E / 37.97389°N 41.38472°E / 37.97389; 41.38472[1]
Country	Turkey
Province	Siirt Province

Arzen (in Syriac Arzŏn or Arzŭn, Armenian Arzn, Ałzn, Arabic Arzan)^[2] was an ancient and medieval city, located on the border zone between Upper Mesopotamia and the Armenian Highlands. The site of the ancient Armenian capital of Tigranocerta, according to modern scholars, in Late Antiquity it was the capital of the district of Arzanene, a Syriac bishopric and a Sasanian Persian border fortress in the Roman–Persian Wars of the period. 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 the Byzantine Empire and the Hamdanids in the 10th century. By the 12th century, it had been abandoned and ruined. Today, few traces of the town survive.