Damascus

Damascus

Damascus

Damascus, Arabic Dimashq, city, capital of Syria. Located in the southwestern corner of the country, it has been called the “pearl of the East,” praised for its beauty and lushness; the 10th-century traveler and geographer al-Maqdisī lauded the city as ranking among the four earthly paradises. Upon visiting the city in 1867, Mark Twain wrote

To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality.

The city’s Arabic name derives from Dimashka, a word of possibly pre-Semitic etymology, suggesting that the beginnings of Damascus go back to a time before recorded history. The city is commonly called al-Shām, the vernacular name of Syria as a whole, which is said to mean “the left” or “the north,” where the region is situated relative to the Arabian Peninsula. Owing to associations of Damascus with Aram, the biblical capital of the Aramaeans, some Arabic sources link Damascus and the Iram dhāt al-ʿimād (“Colonnaded Aram”) mentioned in the Qurʾān, an identification that has long been disputed. Also contended has been the association of Damascus with Jilliq, a fertile pre-Islamic site whose name derives from a word of unknown origin in use by the Ghassānids active there in the 6th century (see Ghassān). The city is still known by its popular epithet al-Fayḥāʾ (“the Fragrant”), earned perhaps for the freshness of its surrounding orchards and gardens. Many scholars believe that, among the ancient cities of the world, Damascus is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited.

Over the centuries, Damascus has been conqueror and conquered, wealthy and destitute, and capital of empire and small states. Its fame has been sustained by its continuous prominence as a commercial and intellectual centre. Its life has been nourished periodically by immigrants from the hinterland and from the Mediterranean Basin and Southwest Asia. Often a focus of contention by powers of East and West, Damascus’s fortunes have frequently been linked to those of distant capitals, most notably Ashur, Antioch, Rome, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul. Now a burgeoning metropolis of the Middle East, it retains, as it has through centuries of triumph and disaster, an indomitable spirit and a considerable charm.

Area city, 17 square miles (43 square km). Pop. (2007 est.) municipality, 1,669,000.