Tell Halaf (Arabic: تل حلف) is an archaeological site in the Al Hasakah governorate of northeastern Syria, a few kilometers from the city of Ras al-Ayn near the Syria–Turkey border.

Ramesses III of Egypt states in an inscription dating to his 8th Year from his Medinet Habu mortuary temple that Carchemish was destroyed by the "Sea Peoples".

[1] This was a period of climate change and social unrest caused by drought, weakening the central powers, and marking the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age.

In the 10th century BCE, the rulers of the small Aramaean kingdom Bit Bahiani took their seat in Tell Halaf, re-founded as Guzana or Gozan.

King Kapara built the so-called hilani, a palace in Neo-Hittite style with a rich decoration of statues and relief orthostats.

In 894 BCE, the Assyrian king Adad-nirari II recorded the site in his archives as a tributary Aramaean[citation needed] city-state.

The site is located near the city of Ra's al-'Ayn in the fertile valley of the Khabur River (Nahr al-Khabur), close to the modern border with Turkey.

In 1899, when the area was part of the Ottoman Empire, Max von Oppenheim, a German diplomat travelled from Cairo[4] through northern Mesopotamia on behalf of Deutsche Bank, working on establishing a route for the Bagdad Railway.

On 19 November, he discovered Tell Halaf, following up on tales told to him by local villagers of stone idols buried beneath the sand.

[5]: 16, 24, 63 According to archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, he had urged Oppenheim in 1907 to excavate Tell Halaf and they made some initial plans towards this goal at that time.

In August 1910, Herzfeld wrote a letter calling on Oppenheim to explore the site and had it circulated to several leading archaeologists like Theodor Nöldeke or Ignác Goldziher to sign.

Armed with this letter, Max von Oppenheim was now able to ask for his dismissal from the diplomatic service (which he did on 24 October 1910) while being able to call on financing from his father for the excavation.

Significant finds included the large statues and reliefs of the so-called "Western Palace" built by King Kapara, as well as a cult room and tombs.

Artillery fire exchanged between Osman and French troops in the final days of the war had severely damaged the building and the archaeological findings had to be dug out of the rubble.

Although the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin took care of the remains, months passed before all of the pieces had been recovered and they were further damaged by frost and summer heat.

Oppenheim and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft the Vorderasiatisches Museum engaged in its largest-scale restoration project since the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate.