Tell Zeidan

5 kilometres east of Raqqa, on the east bank of the Balikh just north of where the river runs into the Euphrates, stand three low mounds. Together they cover a little over twelve hectares. The settlement here dates to between 6000 and 4000 BC, the Ubaid period: the age before cities, when villages were growing large and beginning to smelt copper and use seals. This is the northern edge of the Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia.

Getting there

Ten minutes out of Raqqa on the road towards Deir ez-Zor; the mounds lie north of the road, by the river. Take a taxi from the city and keep it waiting, because there is nothing to get back in. No public transport runs here.

What to see

Honestly: very little. Three low rises, fields between them, the river along the side. Nothing stands, no trench is open, no board explains anything. The value of this place is not in the view but underneath it: two thousand years of life before urban life are stacked inside these mounds, and few sites in northern Syria carry that period at this scale. Whether it is worth the trip depends on you — for someone who can read a tell it is a document, and for anyone else it is a field.

What not to miss

Ask about the state of the Raqqa Museum before you come out. The excavation was run jointly by the museum’s director and a team from the University of Chicago, and the museum is where the finds were meant to end up. A second thing: from between the mounds you can see the point where the Balikh joins the Euphrates. That junction is the one-sentence explanation of why the mound is here — the valley route from the north crosses the great river road at this spot.

What remains

The joint Syrian–American excavation began in 2008, ran two seasons, and a third was planned for the summer of 2010; it never happened. After 2011 part of the mound was dug into by looters, and those holes are still there. The site is unfenced, unguarded and surrounded by farmland. Ask in Raqqa about the road and the ground before you set out; the fields around the mounds are cropped and cut by irrigation channels.