Pottery and building remains from the Iron Age I have been excavated in the village. Apparently Tur'an was at that time surrounded by a city wall. Apparently it was of a considerable size in the late tenth to the mid-ninth centuries BCE. The PEF's Survey of Western Palestine found caves and rock-cut cisterns in the village, which they noted appeared to be an ancient site. The village was known in the Roman and Byzantine periods as Tir'an. It was a Jewish village whose inhabitants probably converted to Islam by the end of the early Islamic Arab period in Palestine. Pottery from the early Islamic, and Mamluk have also been excavated, together with building remains from the same period.
Ottoman era
In 1517, Tur'an was with the rest of Palestine incorporated into the Ottoman Empire after it was captured from the Mamluks, and by 1596, it appeared in the Ottoman tax registers as being in the nahiya of Tabariyya, part of Sanjak Safad. It had a population of 48 households, all Muslim. They paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, olive trees, fruit trees, goats and/or beehives; a total of 5,410 akçe. A map from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 by Pierre Jacotin showed the place, though misplaced, named as Touran. In 1838, it was noted as a large Muslim, Catholic Christian and Greek Christian village in the Nazareth district. In 1848, William F. Lynch described Tur'an as "quite a fortification." The French explorerVictor Guérin visited Tur'an in 1870, and estimated it had 350 Muslims and 200 "Greeks". In 1881, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described it as "A stone village, partly built of basalt, containing about 300 inhabitants, half Christian, half Moslem. The village is situated al the foot of the hills, and is surrounded by groves of olives. There is a good spring to the north-west." A population list from about 1887 showed that Tor'an had about 600 inhabitants; mixed Christians and Muslims.
In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Tur'an had a population of 768; 542 Muslims and 226 Christians. Of the Christians, 52 were Orthodox and 174 were Melkite. The population had increased in the 1931 census to 961; 693 Muslims and 268 Christians, in a total of 188 occupied houses. In the 1945 statistics the population was 1,350; 1,010 Muslims and 340 Christians, with 29,743 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 1,153 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 11,909 for cereals, while 34 dunams were built-up land.
On 18 July 1948 the Israeli captured Tur'an during the second part of Operation Dekel. The houses of those villagers who had fled were later used to house Arab refugees from neighbouring villages. The village remained under Martial Law until 1966.
