Nusaybin

Nusaybin is separated from the larger city of Qamishli by the Syria–Turkey border.

The city is at the foot of the Mount Izla escarpment at the southern edge of the Tur Abdin hills, standing on the banks of the Jaghjagh River (Turkish: Çağçağ), the ancient Mygdonius. The city existed in the Assyrian Empire and is recorded in Akkadian inscriptions as Naṣibīna. Having been part of the Achaemenid Empire, in the Hellenistic period the settlement was re-founded as a polis named "Antioch on the Mygdonius" by the Seleucid dynasty after the conquests of Alexander the Great. A part of first the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire, the city was mainly Syriac-speaking, and control of it was contested between the Kingdom of Armenia, the Romans, and the Parthian Empire. After a peace treaty contracted between the Sasanian Empire and the Romans in 298 and enduring until 337, Nisibis was capital of Roman Mesopotamia and the seat of its governor (Latin: dux mesopotamiae). Jacob of Nisibis, the city's first known bishop, constructed its first cathedral between 313 and 320.