Gaziantep ('Aynṭab)

'Aynṭab (Armenian Antaph, Latin Hamtab), called Antep, and Gaziantep since 1921, is an important town in south-east Anatolia and the chief place of a vilayet with five kazas: Gaziantep, Kilis, Nizip, İslahiye and Pazarcık. It had 50,965 inhabitants in 1935. The town lies on the upper Sajur, a tributary of the Euphrates, near the junction of two important roads: one from Mar'ash to Aleppo, and one from Diyarbakır, Urfa (Edessa) and Birecik on the Euphrates towards Adana. ¹

In ancient times Doliche (Dulük, now Dülükbaba), a little to the north-east, held the place that 'Aynṭab later took; 'Aynṭab, probably the Diba of Ptolemy and the Tyba of Cicero, was then only a dependency of it. After the Hamdanid Sayf al-Dawla took Dulük in 351/962, 'Aynṭab began to acquire the importance that Dulük had lost. On the eve of the First Crusade it belonged to the Armenian Philaretus. It was granted in fief, with Tell Bashir, to Joscelin of Courtenay, and then to his son Joscelin II. After Joscelin II was captured by the troops of Nur al-Din in 1150, the Franks ceded the region to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus; in 1151 the Seljuk ruler of Konya, Mas'ud, annexed it, and after his death in 1153 Nur al-Din took it. From then on it was part of the province of Aleppo, an advance post first of the Ayyubids and then of the Mamluks against the Seljuks and the Armenians. The Mongols occupied it briefly in 1271 and 1280. Timur took it in 1400; Kara Yusuf of the Kara Koyunlu then annexed it, and it passed to the Turkoman Dhu l-Qadr dynasty, which submitted to the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. It was detached to Egypt under Muhammad Ali between 1832 and 1840. At the end of the First World War it was occupied by the English in 1919, and then by the French until 1921. ¹

Before the First World War nearly a third of its population was Armenian. It was also the centre of an American mission with a college. The region is known for pekmez, the preserve or must of grapes. ¹