Syrian History

Archaeologists have demonstrated that Syria was the center of one of the most ancient civilizations on earth. Around the excavated city of Ebla in northern Syria, discovered in 1975, a great Semitic empire spread from the Red Sea north to Turkey and east to Mesopotamia from 2500 to 2400 B.C. The city of Ebla alone during that time had a population estimated at 260,000. Scholars believe the language of Ebla to be the oldest Semitic language.
Syria was occupied successively by Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Byzantines, and, in part, Crusaders before finally coming under the control of the Ottoman Turks. Syria is significant in the history of Christianity; Paul was converted on the road to Damascus and established the first organized Christian Church at Antioch in ancient Syria, from which he left on many of his missionary journeys.

Damascus, settled about 2500 B.C., is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It came under Muslim rule in A.D. 636. Immediately thereafter, the city's power and prestige reached its peak, and it became the capital of the Omayyad Empire, which extended from Spain to India from A.D. 661 to A.D. 750, when the Abbasid caliphate was established at Baghdad, Iraq.

Damascus became a provincial capital of the Mameluke Empire around 1260. It was largely destroyed in 1400 by Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror, who removed many of its craftsmen to Samarkand. Rebuilt, it continued to serve as a capital until 1516. In 1517, it fell under Ottoman rule. The Ottomans remained for the next 400 years, except for a brief occupation by Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt from 1832 to 1840.

The Mesopotamians first occupied the region in 2300 BC. Since then, Syria has been controlled by Assyrians, Babylonians, Semitic Amorites, Persians, Phoenicians, Macedonians, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs and Turks, and each has left its fingerprints for the modern world to read. The Assyrians demonstrated the first widespread and practical use of the wheel (on warchariots); the Phoenicians, trading throughout the Mediterranean, bequeathed the alphabet to the Greeks and Romans; and the Crusaders built a chain of castles that can still be admired. Modern Syria came into being in the early 20th century. After Damascus (and the Ottoman Empire) fell to the British at the close of World War I, Prince Faisal, a wartime ally of the British (and future king of Iraq), formed the independent Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920. Soon afterward, the French marched in and kept Syria as a protectorate until 1941. In the 1960s, Syria joined Egypt in the United Arab Republic (the two stars in Syria's flag today come from that period), but the union soon fell apart and the Syrian Arab Republic was born. For years, Syria allied itself with the Soviet Union. Today, its isolation from the West appears to be easing. That's partly due to the Soviet collapse, but the government is also feeling pressure from a small but growing private sector to develop the economy -- and tourism would certainly aid that effort. While Syria's economy is currently held together by oil exports, the country's oil wells are expected to run dry within a decade.

The formidable President Hafez al-Assad ruled Syria with an iron fist for 30 years until his death in 2000. He tolerated no dissidence -- in 1982 the Syrian Army suppressed an uprising by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood by killing some 20,000 townspeople in Hama. Now that the presidency has been passed on to his son, Bashar Assad, there has been much speculation about the course the country will take and how it will affect regional politics.