connexions that imply seats near the Persian Gulf.[9] The district name Osroene for [Greek: Orrhoênhê], is Greek, perhaps due to analogy of Chosroes. It occurs but rarely in Syriac (Uzroina); e.g. Chronicle of Edessa. § 35;[10] elsewhere Beth-Urhaye (e.g. Cureton, _Spicileg. Syr._ 20). In the time of Tiglath-pileser I. (c. 1100 B.C.) the name seems to have been "District of (not Edessa, but) Harran" (Annals, vi. 71). The Arabs pronounced the name er-Ruha (see above), and that form prevailed till it gave place to Urfa in the 15th century. The Greek name Edessa appears in the Jerusalem Targum to Gen. x. 10 as Hadas ([Hebrew: hadas], myrtle); it has been proposed (cf. Duval, _Hist. d'Édesse_, 23) to derive Edessa from Aram. [Hebrew: hadat], as though = Carthage, New Town; but Syriac writers, when they occasionally [11] use the name (Edessa, [Hebrew: adasa]; so Yaqut, Adasa), show no suspicion of its being Semitic. According to Pliny, v. 86, Edessa was also called Antioch, and coins of Antiochus IV. Epiphanes with the legend "Antioch on the Callirrhoe" may imply that he rebuilt and renamed the place (so Ed. Meyer in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, col. 1933, 66; otherwise Duval, _Hist._ 23; cf. art. OSROENE). Pliny indeed seems to call the city itself Callirrhoe, and S. Funk finds it so named in the Talmud (_Bab. Mez._, 18a [Hebrew: raal raham bahara shuiar meta]: _Die Juden in Babylonien 200-500_, ii. 148; 1908); but K. Regling (_Klio_, i. 459 n. 1) may be right in his emendation which applies the title in Pliny to the sacred spring. _History: Pre-Hellenistic._--Until excavation gives us more definite data we can only infer from its position on one of the main thoroughfares between the Mediterranean and the East (see MESOPOTAMIA) that Urhai-Edessa, possibly bearing some other name, was already a town of some importance in the early Babylonian-Assyrian age. Whatever may have been the ethnographical type of the early inhabitants, it must by the beginning of the second last millennium B.C. have included Hittites in the large sense of the term, probably Aryans, and certainly Semites of some of the types characteristic of early Assyrian history. Most probably its people belonged to the domain of the then more famous Harran-Carrhae, between which and Samosata (on the Euphrates) Urhai lies midway (some 25-30 m. distant from each) in the district watered by the Balih. Although at Edessa itself no cuneiform documents have yet been found, a little more than four hours journey eastwards, at Anaz (= Gullab?) = Dur of Tiglath-pileser IV. was found in 1901 a slab with a bas-relief and an inscription; and 15-20 min. W. of Eski-Harran, in 1906 a very interesting 6th-century Assyrian inscription (see MESOPOTAMIA).