Halaf and Late Chalcolithic occupations at Shakar Tepe in the Shahrizor Plain, Iraqi Kurdistan: Preliminary report of the 2023 excavations
10,000 years ago one of the earliest villages on the Shahrizor Plain was built and lived in at the nearby settlement mound of Bestansur.
In the late third and early second millennium bc, the large plain known today as the Shahrizor and its surrounding region, located in the province of Suleymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, likely formed an important region of the kingdom of Simurrum (Fig. 31.1; Altaweel et al. 2012). For much of the remaining second millennium bc and into the irst two centuries of the irst millennium bc, the region was a contested border zone between northern and southern Mesopotamian kingdoms or became splintered into small kingdoms.