10 kilometres (6.2 mi) southwest of the town of Tal Afar are the mounds of Yarim Tepe which yielded remains from the Halafian culture from the Hassuna, Halaf and Ubaid periods, between 7,000 and 4,500 BC.
Tel Afar has been thought to be a city mentioned in the Bible, Telassar or Thela'sar, mentioned in 2 Kings 19:12 and in Isaiah 37:12 as a city inhabited by "the children of Eden" which had been conquered and was held at the time of the Sennacherib by theAssyrians.
Austen Henry Layard visited Tal Afar and wrote about his experience there in several of his books. In Nineveh and its remainspublished in 1867, Layard writes:
� Tel Afer was once a town of some importance ; it is mentioned by the early Arab geographers, and may perhaps be identified with the Telassar of Isaiah, referred to, as it is, in connection with Gozan and Haran. It has been three times besieged, within a few years, by Ali Pasha of Baghdad, Hafiz Pasha, and Injeh Bairakdar Mohammed Pasha. On each occasion the inhabitants offered a vigerous resistance. Mohammed Pasha took the place by assault. More than two-thirds of the inhabitants were put to the sword, and the property of the remainder was confiscated. Great wealth is said to have been discovered in the place, on its pillage by Mohammed Pasha, who took all the gold and silver, and distributed the remainder of the spoil amongst his soldiers. �
�After Hafiz Pasha�s expedition in 1837 Tall �Afar was occupied permanently by Turkish troops and started to be used as a base to control the movements of a number of the Yazidi tribes of eastern Sinjar. In the 1880s Tall �Afar became an administrative unit depending on the Sinjar qadha.�
In 1920, Tal Afar was used as a base of operations for a planned revolt against the then ruling British.
Sometime during the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Turkish Army founded the city as a sole military outpost constructed on top of a hill
