Eğil

Eğil lies north of Diyarbakır in the upper Tigris country, beneath an ancient fortress cut into the rock. Around the end of the eleventh century Pir Badr, supported by local people including the Mirdasi tribe, took the castle and established a local emirate. His descendants continued to rule the district under a succession of larger powers, making the fortress the seat of a remarkably enduring family lordship.

Eğil came under Ottoman sovereignty in 1515 after periods of Aq Qoyunlu and Safavid rule. Its emirs retained a privileged position within the new provincial order. In the seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi counted Eğil among the Kurdish hereditary territories of the Diyarbakır province, whose rulers controlled local revenues rather than dividing the land into ordinary military fiefs. Family genealogies preserved the emirs' claims to descent from Pir Mansur, an ancestor associated with the region's early Islamic history.