Arzen (in Syriac Arzŏn or Arzŭn, Armenian Arzn, Ałzn, Arabic Arzan) was an ancient and medieval city, located on the border zone between Upper Mesopotamia and the Armenian Highlands. The site of the ancient Armenian capital of Tigranocerta, according to modern scholars, in Late Antiquity it was the capital of the district of Arzanene, a Syriac bishopric and a Sasanian Persian border fortress in the Roman–Persian Wars of the period. After the Muslim conquests, it briefly became the seat of an autonomous dynasty of emirs in the 9th century, before being devastated in the wars between the Byzantine Empire and the Hamdanids in the 10th century. By the 12th century, it had been abandoned and ruined. Today, few traces of the town survive. Antiquity The origin of the name Arzĕn (reflecting the Armenian pronunciation) is unknown, but non-Armenian. Its site, on the banks of the river Garzan Su (ancient Nicephorius) in southeastern Turkey, was visited and identified in the early 1860s by John George Taylor, then British consul in Diyarbakir, who sketched its outline in his Travels in Kurdistan (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 35, 1865). In 1995–96 (The site of Tigranocerta, in Revue des Études Arméniennes, Vol. 25, pp. 183–254 & Vol. 26, pp. 51–118), T. A. Sinclair identified Arzen with the site of Tigranocerta, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia founded by Tigranes the Great, instead of previously current identifications with Martyropolis or Kızıltepe. In Classical Antiquity, Arzen was the chief city and capital of the district of Arzanene. Under the Kingdom of Armenia, Arzanene was governed by a march-warden (bdeašx). In the peace of 297, the city along with the rest of the district of Arzanene, and the neighbouring districts of Sophene, Ingilene, Zabdicene and Corduene was ceded to the Roman Empire by the Sasanian emperor Narseh, but returned to Sasanian control in 363. The office of bdeašx apparently continued to be filled, as a holder named Hormizd is mentioned by Procopius in 528 leading a Sasanian army. The city is attested as a bishopric of the Syriac Church for the first time , as a suffragan of Nisibis. In the 5th and 6th centuries it was a bastion of the Sasanians in their recurrent wars with the Byzantine Empire. Its strategic importance derived from its location on the route from Amida in Upper Mesopotamia via Lake Van to the Armenian Highlands and