Archaeological and architectural remains in the city of Mosul during the era of the Kara Koyunlu Turkmen state

Abstract

The Kara Koyunlu, one of the Turkic Mongol tribes belonging to the Uyghur Turkic tribes, their original homeland is in Central Asia, Turkestan, Armenia and eastern Anatolia. They were called the Kara Koyunlu, meaning the state of the black sheep, a description that was attached to them when they owned and raised black sheep. They even made the image of black sheep on their banners, which they adopted as their emblem, to distinguish them from their enemies from the Aq Koyunlu tribes, whose flags and banners bore the shape of white sheep. The Kara Koyunlu began to appear on the scene of events following the collapse of the Jalayirid state in the city of Mosul, where they extended their influence and made it a military and war center in Iraq to complete their political and military conflicts with the Jalayirid, Timurids and Aq Koyunlu. This resulted in the city of Mosul turning into ruin and total destruction. Sciences and arts declined, development and prosperity stopped, and construction and urbanization works were rare, except for a few archaeological remains. The architectural and artistic remains that are attributed to the era of the rule of the Kara Koyunlu princes in the eighth and ninth centuries AH, the sixth and seventh centuries AD, where the city was given a form that clearly showed its plans, the expansion of its construction, the prosperity of its conditions and its situation, the invaders had no role in it, but rather the credit for that goes to the efforts of the people of Mosul and its men from its knowledgeable scholars, righteous sheikhs and wealthy notables from merchants, writers and intellectuals, who had great credit in rebuilding it, renewing its structure, constructing its mosques, schools and shrines and strengthening its fortifications, which was represented by preserving many archaeological, architectural and artistic remains such as marble entrances, flat niches, hollow niches and other rare archaeological pieces that were distributed in the mosques, mosques, schools, and houses of knowledge and hadith, and the shrines of the prophets, saints and righteous people, and other archaeological remains....