Coordinates of Biblical Archaeological Sites

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This feature gives latitude and longitude for use with Google Earth to allow you to view satellite imagery of various locations of Biblical or prophetic interest.

MAP LOCATIONS FOR DISCOVERIES & RELATED AREAS

NOTE: Certain areas of the world have low resolution images making it almost impossible to see the object. Jerusalem is also a low resolution image.

NOTE: In Genesis we read of the selection of Abram (Abraham) to be the father of the chosen people, and we discover that he is living in Ur of the Chaldees (called “Urfa” today), which is within 100 miles of Babel. Given the call to go to Canaan, he and his family set out, stopping in Haran (Harran) about 35 miles south of Ur, where Terah dies. There is another Ur south of Baghdad but we believe Urfa is the biblical one.

The evidence shows conclusively that Abraham’s family settled in the region a little south of the Babel site, in the area of the Euphrates “loop” and the tributary, the Balikh River.

Sarugi (Serug, Abraham’s great grandfather’s name), is located halfway between the Euphrates and Haran. A town called Nahuru located in the Balikh Valley below Haran (Nahor, the name of Abraham’s grandfather as well as a brother, which was Rebekah’s home (Gen. 24:10) which Abraham sent his servant to bring her for his son Isaac’s wife) is known from both the Cappadocian tablets and the Mari tablets (discovered in 1935 and belonging to the eighteenth century BC) to be in the same region.

In the region of Haran there is unmistakable evidence of the extended Hebrew residence in the vicinity of the Balikh and Habur Rivers, two tributaries of the Euphrates east of the great bend south of ancient Carchemish.

The town of Haran (Genesis 11:31; 12:5) is still in existence on the Balikh River sixty miles west of Tell Halaf. It was flourishing in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BC, as is known from in its cuneiform sources. The name appears in Assyrian documents as Harranu (“road”) because of the trade route (Damascus-Nineveh-Carchemish).

The name of Abraham’s father, Terah, is preserved at Til-sa-Turah, the “ruin of Terah” in the Balikh Valley. What is remarkable is that all these geographical names are found in the district of Harran- according to the Biblical traditions it is precisely in this region that Abraham’s family stayed.

Others listed in Genesis 11:10-30 have left traces in this territory, called Paddan-Aram (Aramaic paddana, “field or plain” of Aram) in Genesis (25:20; 26:6, 7; etc.). Reu corresponds to later names of towns in the Middle-Euphrates valley. Peleg recalls later Paliga on the Euphrates just above the mouth of the Habur.

Near the eastern end of the Mount Ararat valley on the Aras River is a town called Nakhichevan (just east of the Iranian border in Azerbaijan.) Numerous Armenian traditions ascribe the founding of the city of Nakhichevan to Noah.