ALEPPO

By Carol Miller^*

"Before mass media, the writing of history was a cosmetic art."
Will Durant

Aleppo ("Halab" or "Chalab" -- "the White City"-"Armi" during the Third Millennium, "Beroia" to the Seleucids, "al-Hamdaniyeh" in the tenth century, "Alep" to the French) is probably older than time, older than human habitation in northern Syria, older than the trade routes across the Near East.

Aleppo was old when Fifth Millennium inhabitants abandoned their pottery shards on Tell al-Sawda and Tell al-Ansari, just south of the present-day urban center. Aleppo was already known and envied in the Third Millennium, according to the cuneiform tablets unearthed in the Ebla archives, that describe the commercial and military proficiency of the Syrian "Armi", homonym of a city, probably contemporary, in the Indus Valley.

Texts in the libraries of Mari and Ugarit, dating from the Second Millennium, extol its dominance of the trade lanes. Aleppo, or Halab, was known then as the capital of Yamkhad or Yamhad, a Canaanite kingdom, whose king received a statue of Ishtar from the king of Mari, as a sign of deference, to be displayed in the temple of Hadad in Kilasou.

Yet Ebla, Ugarit and Mari ultimately perished while Aleppo lived on, their story engraved in its own library of 20,000 cuneiform tablets, that described their destruction and lauded Aleppo's unimaginable resilience, against time and the earthquakes, against famine, force and fear, against invasion by some to the convenience of others, against the changing appetites and fashions and passions of cultures that came, conquered, and departed, leaving the soft, rounded hills, the copses of cypress, and the clean running streams essentially as they had found them.

According to myth or legend, Aleppo was called "Halab" or "White" because of Abraham, who stopped here on his way back from his journey along the Euphrates. He was accompanied only by his cow. He found, however, instead of the thriving city of repute, a devastated village, victim of the rampage and plundering of a neighboring state. He called out to God, it was said, and the cow gave great quantities of frothy white milk, as white as the cow's own soft hide, more and more, as the villagers lined up with their goatskins. The cow gave so much milk that Halab was saved, and prospered again. So Abraham left his cow to the citizens, who called their village after its glowing white skin, while the Prophet or Patriarch moved on in his travels.

Aleppo's relevant history actually begins in the Yamkhad period, when its monarch, Hammurapi I, forged a fierce nation out of the warring city-states that surrounded him. When conflicting interests and petty rivalries wrested a number of these territories from his jurisdiction, his son Abba'el, who ruled during the eighteenth century B.C., was able to recover them.

Though a certain discrepancy exists among academics, regarding the successions of monarchs and statesmen, it would appear that Abba'el had a brother, Yarim-Lim I, who ascended the throne of Yamkhad when the region came under Amorite rule. A power struggle was raging over control of the kingdom of Mari. According to the Mari archives, Yarim-Lim I was in fact a key statesman of the time, whose alliances with the kings of Larsa, Eshnunna and Qatna determined the political fortunes of the regional hegemonies, while he benefited from their trade routes, which all crossed his territory. Yet these same alliances, through changing loyalties, would be instrumental in the later destruction of Mari.

Yarim-Lim I granted Zimri-Lim, the last king of Mari, asylum in Aleppo when the Assyrians had taken control of Zimri-Lim's royal precincts; and Yarim-Lim married him to his own daughter Shibtu. When Zimri-Lim, through a brilliant coup, recovered his throne, Shibtu was allowed considerable political and administrative responsibility, and with her entourage and descendents -- all women -- was inordinately influential in her Euphrates stronghold, in part because of the high regard of her husband for her royal family in Aleppo.

Yamkhad's relations with Mari continued indefinitely on a cordial basis. The two rulers, father-in-law and son-in-law, traveled together extensively on visits of state. They were especially well received in Ugarit, whose king was enamored of the glamour and extension of Zimri-Lim's legendary palace, and promised to expand his own lavish residence, to emulate the insuperable magnificence of the Mari estates.

Both Zimri-Lim and Yarim-Lim I, as it happens, were allies of Hammurabi, son of Sin-Muballit, Amorite ruler and celebrated legislator -synonimous with his timeless code of law -- who consolidated the First Babylonian Dynasty, sometime around the late-eighteenth century B.C.

At the time of Hammurabi's accession to the throne, Mesopotamia was largely dominated by the powerful king Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria, political rival of Zimri-Lim; and the ruthless Rim-Sin of Larsa, according to historical annals "defeated by Hammurabi in his thirtieth year". A year later Hammurabi also gained control over Eshnunna, which governed the eastern trade routes to Iran and beyond. Yarim-Lim's associations with the eastern kingdoms were no longer a guarantee of stability in the region and Mari, which had been a long-time ally of Babylon, was now a disturbance. Hammurabi betrayed his treaties with Zimri-Lim, took the city in c. 1750 and thus secured for Babylon the western extensions of the Euphrates. Following his sacking and destroying of Mari, however, Hammurabi was committed to sharing a frontier with Aleppo. The kingdom of Yamkhad, which played a key role in Near Eastern trade of the time, was obliged to reassess its political alliances.

King Parrattarna of the Hurrians gained control of Aleppo. A text inscribed on a statue of Idrimi, Mitannian king of Mukish, was discovered in a temple in Alalakh: "In Halab [Aleppo], in the house of my fathers, a crime had occurred and we fled. I took my horse, my chariot and my squire and went into the desert [for seven years] until I came, at last, to spend the night before the throne of Zakkar [in Ebla]. The next day I set out for Canaan, and I journeyed there to Amiya, where I found also people from Halab. When they saw me they recognized me, as son of [Ilimilimma, king of Aleppo, c. 1500] their murdered lord, and so they gathered around me. And so I became king of Alalakh and made an alliance with Halab, and with Pilliya of Kizzuwatna [in Cilicia], and with my own coastal kingdom of Mukish, and I received as well the help and support of the people of Emar." And so Idrimi of Mitanni became the vassal king of the Hurrian Parrattarna. Mitanni's day was yet to come.

Mursili I, Hittite ruler of the Old Kingdom, meanwhile, determined to enlarge his realm, set out to consolidate the achievements of Hattusili, his grandfather, by demolishing Aleppo, "the mighty kingdom", considered key to the control of the region, "Halab that had dominated northern Syria for centuries and which had supported the neighboring city-states against the military advance of Hattusili, my grandfather."

One of Mursili I's eventual successors was Tudhaliya I (c. 1420 B.C.), Hittite king of the Early Empire Period, who again set out to assert Hittite domination in northern Syria, especially against Halab/Aleppo, as a buffer against the growing strength of a renewed Mitanni. Aleppo as it happened, through several treaties with small states throughout the region, managed to survive despite the Hittite advance. The evidence in fact suggests that as a result of the aggressive expansion of the Hittites, and their repeated assaults on the kingdom of Aleppo, the cities and peoples on the northern Mesopotamian plain and along the banks of the Euphrates came to forge a new political entity, which eventually evolved into the highly aggressive Mitannian state; this would include Aleppo among its allies.

Meantime, Hittite prince Telepinu briefly ruled Halab (Aleppo) during the fourteenth century. He had been trained as a priest of Nerik, the weather god, and probably maintained this function until the region was conquered and he was deposed by Suppiluliuma I, c. 1344, Hittite king of the Empire Period who attacked a number of Syrian states, among them Aleppo, Amarr? and Alalakh. Suppiluliuma forged a fruitful dynastic alliance by marrying the daughter of a Babylonian king and later attempted a treaty with Egypt, to round out his fortunes; but his soldiers brought back the plague from the Nile.

And so the population of Aleppo was depleted and the city submerged in neglect and despair. As time passed, however, Aleppo began to recover, and to slowly evolve into one of the completely independent and unrelated neo-Hittite states -- that included Ain Dara and Tell Halaf as well as Halab -- while gradually developing a viable culture of considerable worth, until the catastrophic invasion of the "Sea Peoples" c. 1200, which affected the entire eastern Mediterranean.

Aleppo, happily, always resilient, and unlike the other neo-Hittite regimes, was able to endure, until the rise of Shalmaneser III, Assyrian king, the son and successor of Ashurnasirpal II, who by c. 853 had collected supplies and tributes from defeated city-states throughout the region. And so he proceeded through Aleppo into the territory of Hamath (Hama), "where at Qarqar on the Orontes he was faced by the combined forces of a number of hostile states."

A stone stela discovered at Kurkh claimed victory by Shalmaneser III over his multiple foes "by the simple means of putting 25,000 arrogant men to the sword". No king before or since has left such an abundance of documentation, in the way of royal inscriptions and officially prescribed annals summarizing his campaigns in order of the years of his long and active reign. He expanded Assyrian influence despite growing unrest, and maintained his father's kingdoms, but at the price of incessant military activity. His campaigns in the north, which affected especially Aleppo, but also the southern regions of Anatolia, are described in the record as "the destruction of alien settlements and the collection of tributes, particularly horses".

With such a long history of triumphs and defeats Aleppo was naturally susceptible to occupation by the neo-Babylonians (Chaldeans), followed by the Persians (539-333), who left scant remains. Though control during the subsequent Hellenistic period was slim, the Seleucid generals at least entered the region quietly, without destruction or disturbance, yet effected visible modifications to the city plan. Aleppo, known during this period by the Macedonian toponym of "Beroia", grew from a village around a modest mound on a bend in the Quweiq River - now a modern quarter in today's bustling Aleppo-- to a true urban structure, centered on a hill to the east, ideal for the proposed acropolis. Early foundations of the prior city had been laid in irregular patterns on unoccupied land or had served to replace at random the original local communities. The standardized Greek grid plan layout, which normally departed from a main street that divided the city lengthwise, had to be adapted to the new city's uneven topography. In effect a Greek population, a Greek name and polis institutions were loosely attached to an existing non-Greek city. Military interests played only a minor role. The combination of a settlement and a colony was the priority, and was used to encourage the acceptance of Greek culture, and to promote the native population as "members" of the city.

When Seleucid domination waned, between 96 and 69 B.C., control was assumed by a local dynasty, which in turn dissolved in the anarchy that had permeated the region as a result of invasions from the north, this time from Armenia, a situation that was only stabilized, beginning in 64 B.C., with the Roman conquest of Syria.

And while Aleppo (Beroia) was of little importance to the Romans, who moved their trade lanes and military routes through Cyrrhus and Zeugma out to Palmyra in the east, or through Antioch south to Damascus, the region of Aleppo enjoyed a revival of both agriculture and industry - including northern Syria's most celebrated producer of soap-- therefore a time of unbridled prosperity. This was aborted, however, in 540 A.D. when Chosroes I (Khasrou, Khosru, Kisra), the Sassanid warrior king from Persia, attacked and destroyed Aleppo. The city languished, but not for long. Justinian adapted the ruined city to his sixth-century chain of fortifications, that spread from Antioch to the Euphrates, and erected the first important city walls, the remains of which are today being excavated under the souqs and the khans of the Old City.

In the wake of the Arab expansion, Aleppo fell without resistance, in 637, to the armies of Khaled ibn al-Walid, "The Sword of Allah", and so, with the establishing of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus, became Syria's "second city", officiating between centers of power in Homs and Qansareen. The magnificent Grand Mosque was probably built during this period, under Caliph Walid Ben Addel-Malek (705-715) or his brother Suleiman (715-717). It was destroyed and rebuilt so many times its origins are vague but continuing excavations, conducted over the last several years, presume to offer more precise details, as well as a thorough reconstruction of severely damaged areas. The faithful, meantime, temporarily banned from the prayer hall by trenches and scaffolding, congregate in the courtyard, for gossip, ablutions and prayers, and to watch rather balefully the passing of strangers.

With the founding of the Abbasid Dynasty, Aleppo was again a secondary power, this time subservient to Baghdad, and a constant battleground, caught in the Abbasid wars with the el-Tolonneieen, the el-Quramitah and the Akksshidians of Egypt, who alternated control over the city.

It was only with the establishing of the autonomous control of the short-lived Hamdanids (944-1003), Arab refugees from Iraq, that Aleppo enjoyed a period of singular independence, with renewed trade, and a truly momentous cultural revival expressed especially in art and poetry. The Hamdanid emir, Saif al-Dawlah, made a special place among his intelligentsia for the iconoclasts of the time, including the poet Ahmad ibn Husein. Considered by Arabs - a people traditionally devoted to troubadours and poetry-- as among the best of his genre, he was in fact known as al-Mutannabi: "The Pretender to Prophecy". Born at Kufa in 915, he studied at Damascus, declared himself a prophet, was arrested and released, and settled at the Aleppo court. According to Will and Ariel Durant (see: The Age of Faith, pp. 264-5) "he made his own religion, and notoriously neglected to fast or pray or read the Koran." And while Arabic is an untranslatable language, one of Husein's couplets, while it proved fatal to its author, was effectively transposed to English.

I am known to the horse-troop, the night, and the desert's expanse;
Not more to paper and pen than to sword and the lance.

Attacked by robbers, the poet tried to escape, but his slave reminded him of the bravado in his verses; al-Mutannabi turned to confront his assailants, and died of his wounds.

Another celebrated member of Saif al-Dawlah's court was Muhammad Abu Nasr al-Farabi, the first Seljuk Turk to distinguish himself as a philosopher. Born at Farab in Turkestan, he studied logic under Christian teachers at Baghdad and Haran and, as he loved to boast, had read Aristotle's Physics forty times and the De Anima two hundred times. He was denounced as a heretic in Baghdad, adopted the doctrines and the dress of a Sufi, and lived, he said, "like the swallows in the air". According to his contemporary, Ibn Khallikan, "he never gave himself the least trouble to acquire a livelihood nor possess a habitation." Saif al-Dawlah asked him how much he needed for his maintenance; al-Farabi thought that four dirhens, equivalent then to roughly two dollars a day, would suffice. The prince settled this allowance on him for life. In compensation he produced a number of works, thirty-nine of which survive, many of them commentaries on Aristotle.

And so life continued in Aleppo, even to the extent of once again attracting pilgrims to the city, until Saif al-Dawlah provoked, taunted and finally enraged the Byzantines into reasserting their authority in the region. The invasion in 962 by General, later Emperor, Nicephorus II Phocas, according to Ross Burns, "methodically sacked Aleppo". Much of the population, as slave labor, was deported to Constantinople.

The misery of the next half century was accentuated by eight years of severe and unbending Fatimid domination, beginning in 1015, until the Egyptians were deposed by the Bedouin Mirdasids (1023-1079), who were in turn overturned by the Beni Aqeel, another tribe out of the desert near Mosul, on the Tigris.

Aleppo was again conquered in 1070, this time by the Seljuk Turks, advancing across the western steppes from their homeland in Central Asia. They left the Mirdasids in charge of a vassal state in Aleppo, though the regime, in 1086, was annexed to the Turkish Caliphate, by this time in control of Baghdad.

The endless chaos and confusion set the stage for the advance of the Crusaders in the eleventh century. After the fall of Antioch in 1098 the area of Aleppo, under Crusader control, was cut off from the coast, while the city, under the ineffectual leadership of the Seljuk governor Ridwan, fell to a coalition of orthodox Muslim qadi, or religious leaders, headed by Ibn Khashad, which included the fighters from Mosul. Their first victorious encounter with the Christians, in effect a bloodbath and so it was dubbed - Ager Sanguinis or "Field of Blood"-- took place on the plain of Sarmada in 1119. In retaliation, the city was besieged by Crusaders under the senior Jocelyn of Brakelond, known to Crusaders as "Jocelyn of Edessa".

It was again the Mosul forces who rescued the devastated Aleppo. After the death in Baghdad of Sultan Sinjar, successor to the great Malik Shah (1072-1092) -- who had been called by historians "the most resounding of the Seljuq rulers"-- the Seljuq realm disintegrated into independent principalities of petty dynasties and warring kings. At Mosul, however, one of Malik Shah's Kurdish slaves, Zangi, founded the Atabeg, or Atabek ("Father of the Prince") dynasty, in 1127, which took to zealous battle against the Crusaders and in effect made Aleppo its center of resistance. In time Zangid rule extended its authority over a huge area, from Aleppo to Mesopotamia. It was Zangi's son Nur-ad-din Mahmud, or Nuradin (1146-1173), who ultimately recovered Syria, while he contributed greatly to a united and cohesive Muslim front to counter the Crusades.

Aleppo, meantime, began a new period of ascendance and reconstruction, with the establishment of the first Sunni madrassas and Sufi monasteries. During the Ayyubid period (1176-1260), which followed the Zangid, Aleppo was ruled by one of its most effective governors, Saladin's son al-Malik al-Zaher Ghazi. It was, in fact, this systematic and single-minded administrator who ordered an imperious encircling moat - forty meters wide and twenty-two meters deep-- dug around the Aleppo Citadel, thus transforming a modest castle into one of the greatest, and definitely the most imposing, of all Muslim fortresses; he paved the immense, forty-eight degree, glacis with stone and built the incomparable, infinitely complex, absolutely invulnerable great gateway.

The Aleppo Citadel originally dated from the acropolis of the Seleucid period, when the Amorite temple to Hadad was reinvented as a shrine to Zeus. The Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, in a crisis of Christian faith, visited the hill to make sacrifice to Jupiter. Hamdanid emir Saif al-Dawlah made the citadel hill his residence in the tenth century. The fortress nevertheless, under Ghazi's leadership, was ultimately envisioned as the nucleus of resistance to the Crusades, and became critical to the image of Ayyubid control in northern Syria. The formidable citadel, of exalted proportions, was constantly reinforced, and ever-embellished with greater and more lavish installations, including palaces, aqueduct, cisterns, theater, mosques and baths; and only came to be destroyed by the Mongol invasions that poured through the unprotected frontiers. After the first raids in 1260, made more virulent by the epidemics that came with them, the citadel was restored in 1292, only to be razed by the final wave of Mongol hordes, led by "Lame Timur", or Tamerlane, in 1400, who was said to have murdered 800,000 in a single day. The pyramids of skulls, piled high for all to see, were his trademark.

The citadel was not Ghazi's only triumph. His international treaties with Venice, beginning in 1204, with a monopoly on the goods from the Silk Route through Iran, made Aleppo one of the three greatest urban centers in the Islamic world. This led to the expanding of the bazaars, far from the competition of the Crusader-controlled ports. The Aleppo market, a city unto itself, evolved from Ghazi's time through the subsequent Mamluk period and especially into the Ottoman era, inside monstrous city walls penetrated by fourteen monumental gateways, to eventually include twelve kilometers of souqs, bordered by the khans, or warehouses, of a million tradesmen. From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries this kaleidoscope of medicinal herbs and aromatic spices, dried fruits, coffee, tea, glistening gems, silk and woolen textiles, metals for jewelry or industry, perfumes, precious unguents and essences, rich soap confected of olive oil and laurel, took on a life of its own, with marvelous caravanserai, artisan shops, dwellings, kitchens, latrines, fountains, clinics, prisons, a psychiatric asylum, tribunals, mosques, minarets, and madrassas, to complement the various trades represented in the vaulted lanes, the stone corridors, the carefully wrought buildings and the ramshackle booths, that initially followed the route of the Roman Decumanus, the principal axial thoroughfare, and then inched and crawled into a living mosaic of the peoples, their dress, their wares, and the little white donkeys, like taxis, that even today still carry their goods through the maze.

Ghazi's was also a period of science and mathematics. Astronomy, geography, trigonometry, botany, medicine - especially ophthalmology - and the equipment and competence of hospitals were central to the advance of knowledge, but also contributed to the conflict between religion and research. The Kitah-al-Jami of Ibn Baitar made history, with its listing of 1400 plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of them new, with an analysis of their chemical composition and healing power, and observations as well on their use in therapy. The purpose was prevention as much as cure, a notion that would revolutionize every later approach to medicine. Yet the conversion of many of the greatest scientists to mysticism was a major triumph for Sufism, by this time accepted by orthodoxy, and so for a time it overwhelmed both theology and academics.

The devastation of Aleppo by the Mongol invasions gave way to the seizing of control by the Mamluks of Egypt, who dominated the Islamic world from 1260 to 1516, and who, according to one historian of the time, "abandoned Aleppo to its fate". Yet the Mamluk base in Aleppo afforded an advantage, both for Mamluk building and construction, and for Mamluk military and commercial campaigns, until the resourceful regime had managed not only to expel the Crusaders from the region but also to reroute the caravan traffic back to Aleppo. With this, a sublime new age of prosperity and civic expansion erupted as never before.

When in 1516 the Ottoman Turks displaced the Mamluks in Syria, Aleppo became the seat of the Turkish wali, or governor, and despite disinterest from Istanbul, trade, the city's pulse and prosperity, came alive with new energy, reinforced in the construction of larger and more elaborate khans and caravanserai, lavish baths, hospitals, administrative buildings, schools, consulates, and - like a yin and yang of Islamic architecture --great domed mosques, and rounded minarets in the slim Turkish style.

Since Turkey, over the nearly six hundred years of Ottoman rule, experienced repeated cycles of reform and reaction, the overflow to its provincial capitals affected local fortunes, but also encouraged local projects. The earlier Venetian presence in Aleppo was embellished with factories, consulates and commercial representation by the French, Dutch and British, established under "capitulation treaties" with the Ottoman Porte. Competition from other trade options, such as Britain's sea route to India and China, was in part offset by the enterprise of the growing minority communities, in particular the Maronite Christians from Lebanon, and the Greek Catholics, as well as the Orthodox Armenians, persecuted in Turkey but protected in Aleppo. All of this was reflected in the building inscriptions in graceful calligraphy, the diverse architectural styles, both innovative and traditional decorative elements, and urban design, of the various quarters of the city that grew up through the centuries outside the great walls, beginning with al-Jdeide, "the new quarter" from the late Mamluk period, and continuing into the modern quarter around the National Museum of Aleppo and the Baron Hotel, with its Art Deco overtones on rough-hewn limestone blocks, that mushroomed under the French. Parts of the city are in fact so French Colonial that they could just as well be Saigon, Phnom Penh or Vientiane.

The earliest formal excavations of Aleppo were executed under the auspices of Syria's General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, and were focused specifically on the Roman, Byzantine and Arab periods, beginning at the Bab al-Faraj, and continuing at others of the surviving great gateways, with the discovery of random artifacts from the geographical center of the Old City and around the city walls, including clay vessels, figurines, statuary, articulated dolls, even lamps. All of these relics are to be found in the museum, along with material accumulated from the excavation projects of French, German, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Syrian, Danish and other missions, from Mari, Hama, Ugarit, Ebla, Ain Dara, Tell Hajib, Arslan Tash, Tell Ahmar, Meskeneh, Qalaat Jaber, but particularly Tell Halaf, whose enormous and foreboding black basalt temple figures stand at the museum's entrance, itself a simulation of sorts of Tell Halaf's great temple of the neo-Hittite period. Classical and Byzantine finds occupy the museum's upper level, and include pottery and funerary figures from Palmyra, coins, and assorted utilitarian or votive objects in glass, bronze and mosaic. The Arab period is represented, among other artifacts, with a scale model of the city.

Despite Aleppo's long history and ragged architectural continuity, its erratic city planning, the ravages of time, neglect or errant expansion, and the periodic destruction, followed by rescue and restoration, of many of the most significant monuments, including the city walls themselves, it is a city unlike any other, with a sweetness, a vitality, a pride, a promise. Many streets have no signs, many buildings have no numbers. People keep post office boxes or would never receive their mail. The traffic is manic. The beautiful French Park has seen better days. The trickle that was once the Quweiq has been left to rot. The great Ottoman palaces transformed into romantic hotels or nostalgic restaurants are clammy. Yet a walk, through the new streets or the old, somehow takes the breath away. Every doorway is an invitation, every stairway an enigma, every paving stone a story twice told, and told again, and then forgotten. The souqs, alive during the week, deserted on Friday except for a straggle of men shuffling toward the mosques, are perhaps the greatest elixir, of filtered light and fragile sound that echoes off the vaulted galleries. There is no click on Friday of the little donkey's hooves. No heaving and shoving of bundles. No shouting, no exchange of soccer scores, no flirting with modern girls in light dresses and white headscarves, no cloying perfume from hands just washed or hair just combed. No clouds of cigarette or narguile smoke. No clusters of women in black shrouds, their white hands encased in black cotton gloves, their eyes just a question mark. No one but the tourists stops for coffee at the "Citadel Café".

There are only the quiet streets and the busy mosques, their carpets and prayer rugs damp from feet just washed. Old men enveloped in their scarves, made transparent by the light from the open windows, heads buried in the Koran, crosslegged on a stool or on the floor. Women in repose, mindless and apathetic as their unleashed children scamper under the light flickering from the crystal chandeliers. Groups of men swaying, praying, weeping, wailing, recalling the death of the Shi'ite Hussein or the loss of faith or their own sins. A tomb, perhaps. The green mausoleum of Zachary, father of St. John the Baptist, in the Grand Mosque. Or the inlaid stand for the Koran. Or the lamps. Or the exquisitely carved wooden minbar. "It is," says M. Wahid Khayyata (see: Aleppo in History), "as if the artisans of Aleppo looked for line before color, wisdom before ornamentation, and clarity before brilliance, in a simplicity so modest it only accentuates pure beauty."

Carol Miller, is a sculptress and writer, devoted to her avid research of ancient cultures, from Mexico where she lives, or along her travels throughout the world. "Mari" is a chapter from a forthcoming book, soon to be available at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Among her titles are "The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl", with Guadalupe Rivera Marin, a study in comparative mythology; and "Travels in the Maya World", "The Other Side of Yesterday, the China-Maya Connection" and "Training Juan Domingo: Mexico and Me", exerpts of which can be viewed at http://www.xlibris.com/CarolMiller.html