FROM SOURCE:

In any attempt to chart out Diyarbakir's history through maps, one must start with the Middle Ages. Over the years, different motives have led geographers, travellers, soldiers and political actors to map the region in various ways.

In the Middle Ages, words and expressions borrowed from Arabic such as "cugrâfiyâ" or "ca'râfiyâ" (i.e. "geography"), "sûretü'l-arz" (roughly, "the face/description of the earth"), resmü'l-arz" ("the picture of the earth"), "sifâtû'd-dûnyâ" ("the appearance of the world") and "eskâlü'l-arz" ("the forms of the earth") were used to refer to maps. The cartographic tradition espoused by Islamic geographers was based on Ptolemy (d. 168), whose influence would last for some centuries. Ptolemy defined geography as "a graphical, pictorial representation of the known world".

In these mostly multi-colour maps, the city has been varyingly designated as Amida, Amid, Amed, Kara (Black) Amid, and Diyarbekir in different epochs and finally as Diyarbakir in the early years of the Republic. It is particularly interesting that "Kara Amid" has ended up transliterated as "Caramit" or "Caraemit" in some maps using Latin letters, even though in actuality the city never carried such a name. This quick journey through maps also reveals the changes the city underwent as an administrative unit.