identifies Cepha as the seat of the commander of the Legio II Parthica. The bishop of Cepha is recorded as attending the Council of Chalcedon in October 451, which implies the settlement must have become a sizeable town by that time. As the use of Latin began to wane in the Eastern Roman Empire, Κιφας (Kiphas) became formalized as the Greek name for the Byzantine bishopric. Rescue excavations from 2005 to 2008 uncovered evidence of the base of a Roman gateway to the upper city, a row of shops from the late Roman period, and Roman floor and wall mosaics. By the sixth century, the Persians were mounting frequent attacks on the eastern border of the Byzantine empire. As a consequence, the Byzantines built a great number of military installations in the region during the early and mid-sixth century. Despite this the Persians seized the opportunity of a Byzantine civil war to attack the eastern provinces, in what became the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628. Early in the conflict they occupied Kiphas along with Mardin, Dara and probably the rest of the Tur Abdin, and these were held for most of the rest of the war. The treaty that concluded the war restored Kiphas to Byzantine control, but the gain was to prove short-lived. Writing between about 600 and 610, the Byzantine geographer George of Cyprus mentions Cepha as a fortress in the Mesopotamia section of his Descriptio Orbis Romani. Muslim conquest By the 630s, Muslim Arab forces had conquered large parts of Mesopotamia, Syria and Iran. Kiphas appears most likely to have been captured during the Muslim conquest of Armenia in 640, shortly after the conquest of Nisibis. An account from this period provides the earliest mention of any bridge across the Tigris at this site. Over the subsequent five centuries, the town was ruled Arab dynasties under the name Hisn Kayfa, first by the Ummayad and Abbasid caliphates and later by semi-autonomous Hamdanid and Marwanid rulers. Fatima, the Kurdish mother of the Hamdanid ruler Abu Taghlib, took control of the town in c. 900 A.D. Artuqid period (1102–1232) In the 11th century, Seljuk Turks and their Turkmen and Oghuz allies moved into Western Armenia, culminating in the Seljuk defeat of Byzantine forces at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. Victory at Manzikert quickly resulted in Seljuk forces controlling large parts of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The Seljuk sultan Barkiyāruq