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Tushhan (also Tushan, or Tušhan) is a Kurdish village known as (Kurdish: Behramki) or (Kurdish: Tepe-i Barava) by residents and It was an ancient city that Assyrian have ruled for some time in Mesopotamia. It was a provincial capital in the upper Tigris river valley, on the south bank and inhabited since the Mitanni period, and mainly during the Neo-Assyrian period during the Iron Age.
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It is now believed to be located at the site of the modern Ziyaret Tepe (Kurdish: Tepa Barava), Diyarbakır Province, Turkey.
History
The site of Ziyaret Tepe was occupied as early as the Early Bronze Age. Most of the urban development uncovered to date is from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. In late Assyrian times it was known as Tushhan, until circa 612 BC to 605 BC, when that empire fell. The site is expected to be inundated by the Ilısu Dam around 2014.
Archaeology
Work at the location began with 3 years of surface survey and remote sensing in 1997 Since 2000, site has been excavated by a team directed by Timothy Matney of the University of Akron.
An important assemblage of cuneiform clay tablets was found there, translated by Simo Parpola of Helsinki University.
Spurious "language"
A cuneiform tablet was discovered in 2009 at Ziyaret Tepe that contained a list of around 60 names. It was a list of women deported from an unknown location around 800 BC, during the Neo Assyrian Empire period. According to John MacGinnis of the University of Cambridge McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, these women may have come from around the Zagros Mountains. He said that the most likely possibility was that these names belonged to Shubrians, a people speaking a language isolate. However, nearly all of the names can be identified with known languages, and the supposed language of the "Tushan names" is spurious.
Ziyaret Tepe is quite close to the town of Üçtepe, Bismil (in Turkish), located near Bismil, where in 1861 John George Taylor found the famous Kurkh Monoliths, Assyrian monuments that contain a description of the Battle of Qarqar — of interest to biblical and Ancient Near East studies. In fact, Üçtepe was believed to have been the location of Tushan by some scholars in the past. Today the monoliths are located at the British Museum.