General Information about Hacinebi

Hacinebi is located in the Taurus piedmont zone, on a bluff overlooking the Euphrates river 3.5 km north of the modern town of Birecik.

The region consists of low rolling limestone hills with terra rossa soils bracketing the alluvial terraces of the Euphrates river valley. Rainfall ranges from 400-600 mm annually, permitting reliable cereal agriculture without need of irrigation.

The natural Holocene vegetation of the area was oak-pistachio open parkland, grading off into steppe vegetation to the south. Modern and ancient crops in the Hacinebi area include wheat, barley, lentils, grapes, pistachio, and olive.

The site is strategically located at the juncture of two of the most important trade and communication routes in the Near East.

The first of these arteries is the Euphrates itself - the main north-south trade route linking the forests and copper source areas of the eastern Taurus mountains with the steppes of Syria and the south Mesopotamian alluvium. The area around Hacinebi forms the northernmost easily navigable stretch of the Euphrates river.

For thousands of years, rafts and boats transported goods from this region south into Syria and Mesopotamia. Herodotus describes the north-south river trade along the Euphrates in leather boats, noting that the boats were dismantled in Babylon and brought back upstream by land-based donkey transport. The downstream boat and raft trade was active as recently as the early twentieth century.

Hacinebi also occupies a strategic location on a second key trade route through its location on what has historically been the major east-west crossing point of Euphrates.

The Achaemenid Royal road to Sardis crossed the Euphrates at this point in the fifth century BC. In later periods, the key Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine river crossing town at Zeugma was located approximately 8 km to the northwest of Hacinebi.

From the Medieval Crusader/Islamic period up to the present, the main Euphrates crossing point has been at Birecik, just 3.5 km to the south of the site.

The 3.3 ha roughly triangular-shaped mound of Hacinebi is situated on an easily defensible east-west oriented spur which drops down steeply to the Euphrates river on west, and into deep canyons to the north and south.

Cultural deposits are approximately nine meters deep at the east end of the mound, becoming gradually shallower toward the west, as the natural surface of the spur slopes down toward the bluffs overlooking the Euphrates.