The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Once upon a time in Aleppo
The human toll has been immense but the fighting has also wiped out history of the oldest living city
AS THE last of the convoys carrying rebels and civilians left Aleppo on Friday, Syria’s industrial capital was back in the hands of President Bashar-al-assad for the first time since 2012. With the cessation of hostilities, another chapter has been added to the chequered history of what is known to be the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, with origins dating back to at least 4000 BC.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, is no stranger to war. The city, The Guardian says, has withstood “more than six millennia of pillage and insurrection”. According to Reuters , it was hit by the Mongol invasion of 1260 and by Timur’s invading forces in 1400.
The recent conflagration, however, has been its most intense since the medieval ages. While the human toll has been colossal, the fighting and aerial bombardment have reduced much of the city’s heritage to rubble. That heritage, UNESCO says, was interspersed with monuments that mirrored the influences of the city’s successive rulers: Hittites, Assyrians, Akkadians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Umayyads, Ayyubids, Mameluks and Ottomans.
“Aleppo’smany-layeredpastandcosmopolitanidentityischiseledintoitsveryarchitecture. The city’s Great Mosque and Citadel — a towering edifice on a hilltop at the heart of Aleppo — were statements of medieval Turco-arab might erected atop earlier Roman and Byzantine structures. Well into the 20th century, the city remained home to a diverse mix of faiths and denominations. It always had a prominent, flourishing Jewish community—which,forsomesixcenturies, zealously guarded one of the most famous and venerated copies of the Hebrew Bible, now known as the Aleppo Codex,” writes Ishan Tharoor in Time Magazine.
“Aleppo was a place where you could literally feel history while walking down the old streets. The bazaars take you back to a different time when commerce actually began... You can see where the caravans used to come, carrying goods, and you see the people who are actually in these shops and doing this kind of trade, have inherited that from their fathers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers,” Lina Sergie Attar, an architect who participated in the renovation of the Old City in the 90s, told pri.org. history for some 5,000 years. “Abraham is said to have grazed his sheep on its slopes ... Alexander the Great founded a Hellenic settlement there. More recently, Shakespeare referred to Aleppo in both Macbeth and Othello.”
According to the BBC, the city flourished during the 18th-century BC as the capital of the kingdom of Yamkhad, until it fell to the Hittites. It was absorbed into the Roman Empire and then prospered as a hub for caravan traffic under Byzantine rule. “In 636 AD, Aleppo was conquered by Arab Muslim troops... In the 10th Century, Aleppo became the capital of the northern Syrian Hamdanid dynasty, but it then suffered a period of war and disorder, as the Byzantine Empire, Crusaders, Fatamids and Seljuks fought to gain control of it and the surrounding region,” BBC says.
It thrived during the Golden Age of the Silk Roads from 12th to the early 15th centuries, trading in Chinese silk and porcelain, Central Asian cotton, spices from India, among others. But this came to an abrupt end in 1260, when the Mongols conquered the city. It suffered a devastating attack by Timur in 1400. In 1516, Aleppo became part of the Ottoman Empire, and according to the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC), the Empire’s economic capital. FSTC says Aleppo suffered a great blow with the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869, when, it adds, the ancient city lost 93 per cent of its trade movement. “Aleppo’s role as a transit centre for trade declined in the late 18th Century and was hindered further by France and Great Britain’s demarcation of the borders of modern Syria — which cut the city off from southern Turkey and northern Iraq — and the loss of the Mediterranean port of Alexandretta to Turkey in 1939,” BBC says.
The Guardian also blames politics for the city losing its pre-eminence as a market. “The machinations of the Great Powers turned a vibrant trading city into a divided backwater.insomewaysthatdeclinehelped preserve the medieval nature of the place, but now it is gone,” writes Kevin Rushby.
COMPILED FROM AGENCIES