The ruins of Sinuri are located on the hilltop now called Tarla Tepe, close to the modern village of Çamlıbelen, Milas [tr], Muğla Province, Turkey.

Although two Neolithic stone axes show the age of the site, the archaeological evidence only proves that Sinuri experienced sporadic inhabitation as a natural refuge from the Geometric period onwards.

Regular religious activity would have been conducted in the open, perhaps in a sacred grove, as excavations have found no evidence of Archaic buildings within the outer temenos walls.

[7][8] Alongside Labraunda and Amyzon, Sinuri was one of three rural highland sanctuaries which benefited from extensive patronage by the Hecatomnids who ruled Caria as satraps in the 4th century BCE.

In the 290s BCE, Sinuri was governed by the Macedonian dynast Pleistarchus as part of his territory in northern Caria alongside Heraclea at Latmus and Hyllarima.

[7] A break in the epigraphic record of Sinuri in the early 3rd century BCE suggests that the site was contested between Pleistarchus and Ptolemaic southern Caria in this time.

This process occurred by the time Olympichos, alternately a client of Seleucus II and Philip V, ruled Caria from Alinda in the late 3rd century BCE.

Mylasa recovered its free city status, with tax exemptions, under the Rhodians as previously under the Seleucids; this seemingly encouraged economic activity at the sacred lands of Sinuri.

[14] A small Byzantine basilica from the 5th or 6th centuries CE shows that religious activity continued at Sinuri, albeit on a much smaller scale, even after Christianisation.

[2] This proposal has not been universally accepted, though, and an Anatolian origin for the god is also possible; the second half of the name 'Sinuri' may relate to the Hittite word uri, meaning 'great'.

[2] On this basis, Dolores Hegyi [hu] has suggested that Sinuri may have been the indigenous name for Zeus Karios, which Herodotus identified as the most popular god in Caria in his time.

[7][18] A bull-sacrifice festival called the Bouthysia was held every year in the Macedonian month of Loios, approximately July in the Gregorian calendar.

[19][20][21] Although Louis Robert claimed to have found (but not published) a third Carian inscription from Sinuri, Wolfgang Blümel has since confirmed that this was originally a Greek text which had been erased in antiquity.

Land sold to the god was then permanently leased back to the original owner and his descendants, who paid rent in cash and olive oil to the sanctuary.

This arrangement was common in central Caria in the Hellenistic period and hundreds of similar documents survive from nearby Mylasa, Olymos, and Euromos.