Dayr Yakub is a fifth-century monastery on the edge of the suburbs to the south of the modern Turkish city of Şanlıurfa. The monastery is built on the top of a hill above an ancient quarry, which Emma Loosley claims to be “an appropriated site for a former pagan sanctuary”. The earlier site was also used as a necropolis as well as a place of sacrifice as a Palmyrene-style tomb tower, complete with a Syriac inscription (late second or third century), was incorporated into the later monastery buildings (Emma Loosley, “Dayr Yakub,” Architecture and Asceticism, 2012). The inscriptions in Syriac/”near-Palmyrene” script (Segal, J. B. Edessa ‘the Blessed City’. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970: 29) at Dayr Yakub underline the close relations that must have existed, in the time of the monarchy, between the leaders of Edessan society and the West.