In the 10th century BC, the rulers of the small Aramaean kingdom Bit Bahiani took their seat in Tell Halaf, which was re-founded as Guzana. King Kapara built the so-called Hilani, a palace in Neo-Hittite style with a rich decoration of statues and relief orthostats.
In 894 BC the Assyrian king Adad-nirari II recorded the site in his archives as a tributary Aramaean city-state. In 808 the city and its surrounding area was reduced to a province of the Assyrian Empire. The governor's seat was a palace in the eastern part of the citadel mound. Guzana has survived the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and remained inhabited until Roman-Parthian Period.
The site is located near the village of R'as al 'Ayn in the fertile Khabur valley (Nahr al Khabur) through which the Khabur river flows, close to the modern border with Turkey. The name Tell Halaf is a local Arabic placename, tell meaning "hill" in Arabic, and Tell Halaf meaning "made of former city"; what its original inhabitants called their settlement is not known. It was discovered in 1899 by Baron Max von Oppenheim, a German diplomat, while he was surveying the area to build the Baghdad Railway. At the time, Syria was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. He returned to excavate the site from 1911 to 1913 and then again 1929, now under French stewardship following the creation of modern Syria. Oppenheim took many of the artifacts found to Berlin. In 2006, new Syro-German excavations have started under the common direction of Lutz Martin (Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin), Mirko Novák (University of Tuebingen), Joerg Becker (University of Halle) and Abd al-Masih Bagdo (Directorate of Antiquities Hassake).
