Looking out over the Mesopotamian plain from Mardi

I have just started a 3 week trip travelling around south east Turkey, close to the Syrian border - the area once known as Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. My first stop is Mardin, an ancient stone city on a hill, with far-reaching views over the Mesopotamian plain, which they call 'the sea', for obvious reasons. This is a very ethnically mixed area, and you hear many languages: as well as Turkish, there is Arabic, Kurdish and Aramaic, which was the language spoken by Jesus, and is still spoken by the Suriani, the Syriac Orthodox Christians, some of whom still live in Mardin and in villages on the nearby Tur Abdin plateau.