Tall Munbāqa or Mumbaqat, the site of the Late Bronze Age city of Ekalte, is a 5,000-year-old town complex in northern Syria now lying in ruins.
Due to the establishment of the Tabqa Dam at Al-Thawrah, 35 kilometers west of Raqqa, the city ruins are partially flooded today by Lake Assad.
Situated high above the steep drop of the eastern shore, Tall Munbāqa is still preserved.
Town authorities and city destruction characterize the Urbanisationsfieber of the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC in northern Syria, where the river from the Armenian highlands turns to the south-east, 200 km from the nearby Mediterranean were major trading centers.
In 1907, the English explorers William M. Ramsay and Gertrude Bell discovered the ruins, drew up a plan and described the ramparts: "Munbayah where my tents were pitched - the Arabic name means only a high-altitude course - was probably the Bersiba in Ptolemy's list of city names.
Though Bell was wrong in the localization of Bersiba, she did recognize the importance of the mound for the study of the oriental city.
The 400 m x 500 m, rectangular town ruins, once strongly fortified, were documented and investigated 1964, on the occasion of the inspection of the area for a proposed reservoir.