Where was Mesopotamia?

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Mesopotamia, Greek for “between the rivers”, is the land of the Euphrates and the Tigris, most of it in today's Iraq, with the north-east of Syria and the south-east of Turkey. In the Old Testament, though, the word stands for the Hebrew Aram-naharaim, “Aram of the two rivers”: only the upper country around Haran, between the great bend of the Euphrates and the Khabur. The map point stands there, on Haran, about 665 km north-east of Jerusalem in a straight line and about 690 km north-west of Babylon. This upper Mesopotamia was the home of Abraham's kin. His servant “went to Mesopotamia, unto the city of Nahor” to find a wife for Isaac, and Jacob later served Laban there for Leah and Rachel; the Synodal Bible renders Laban's Padan-aram as Mesopotamia too. Balaam was hired “of Pethor of Mesopotamia”, the Pitru of the Assyrian annals on the river Sajur near Carchemish, which lies about 90 km west of Haran; and in the days of the judges Israel served “Chushan-rishathaim king of Mesopotamia” eight years. The New Testament uses the word in its wider Greek sense, the whole land between the rivers down to the Persian Gulf. Among the crowd at Pentecost were “the dwellers in Mesopotamia”, the Jews of Babylonia, and Stephen says that God appeared to Abraham “when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran”: for him Ur, far down the Euphrates, was Mesopotamia as well. Modern historians use the name in this wide sense, for the land of Ur, Babylon and Nineveh; Nineveh lies about 370 km east of Haran.