Damascus

By Carol Miller^*

"Morality is harmony with the laws of Nature.”
Mencius (Mang-Tze)

Damascus is vast. Its history, its grand setting, its broad boulevards. The narrow lanes too small even for a donkey to pass. The closed wooden balconies draped in grapevine. The traditional sweet shops piled high with pastries. The quiet stairways, the Roman columns, Islamic domes, glass lamps, whispering robes, soft shoes. Its boundless energy, its wile, its cunning. The Umayyad Mosque is vast, the maze of the Old City is vast, the parks, the prayer halls, the souqs, the sanctuaries.

Among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is so vast and so ancient that exploration of its many archaeological levels is practically impossible. Its densely populated quarters, inhabited probably since the Fifth Millennium, have permitted, if at all, only the most rudimentary excavation, so the earliest history of the oasis, home first to nomads and shepherds, then to settlers and traders, then to kings, caliphs, crusaders and conquerors, remains for the most part a mystery.

“No province of the Empire surpassed Syria in industry and prosperity,” wrote Suetonius, “and the oldest of its cities was Damascus, fortified by the surrounding desert, and turned almost into a garden by the spreading arms and tributaries of a stream gratefully called ‘Barada’, ‘River of Gold’. Many caravan routes converged here, and poured into the bazaars the products of three continents.”

The first historical references, to “Dimashqa”, appeared in the Mari archives, from the Third Millennium. A mention of “Dimaski”, an Amorite settlement, appears in the Ebla archives of the Second Millennium. Yet history prior to the Iron Age is obscure, though presumably conforms to a place called by the toponym “Upe”, mentioned specifically in the “Amarna Letters”. This collection of cuneiform tablets, indispensable to the comprehension of the political machinations of the period, was discovered by chance in 1887, in Amarna, some 280 kilometers south of Cairo, by a peasant woman digging ancient mud bricks for use as fertilizer. Further digging, both licit and otherwise, brought the total to 382 tablets, now distributed in various of the world’s great museums, including New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and Cairo itself.

While they document life in the capital city of the Pharaoh, Akhenaten, (Amenophis IV, c. 1352-1336), the tablets came originally from “the Place of the Letters of the Pharaoh” or “official records office”, and span a period of between fifteen to thirty years. They are mostly file copies, or letters never sent, or letters received and set aside, a kind of “dead letter file” discarded after Amarna was abandoned and the capital moved to Thebes. But forty-three of these priceless “documents” preserve the diplomatic correspondence, in the Akkadian language, between Egypt and the major powers of western Asia – Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, Hatti and Alashiya – in which the great kings address each other as “brother”. The letters mostly refer to political matters, trade agreements, concessions, petitions, arrangement of diplomatic marriages and exchange of gifts, which are then inventoried; but a number of them include Akkadian myths and epics, syallabaries, lexical texts, a god list, a Hurrian tale, and a comparative glossary of Egyptian and Akkadian words. (See: Dictionary of the Ancient Near East, edited by Piotr Bienkoswky and Alan Millard).

Three hundred and seven tablets are devoted to the correspondence with the Canaanite city-states of Syria and Palestine, which formed part of Egypt’s jurisdiction, and in addition to the customary routine material, provide insight into another dimension of Egyptian power, with regard to tributary rulers, their intrigues and appeals, florid expressions of loyalty, and description of threats from neighboring peoples. The town name of “Upe” is prominently featured in the exchange of letters between Thuthmosis III and Amenophis III, in three of these Amarna tablets, as well as in another tablet that originated in Kamid el-Loz, directly describing a personage, who ostensibly pertained to “Upe”, and who was referred to as “a king of Damascus”.

In this case the term “Damascus” may originally have indicated “a well-watered plain”. The city, however, was also called “Apum”, a name or a designation that appears, prominently though not favorably displayed, in the “Execration Texts”, those Egyptian lists of hostile subjects or undesirable foreign elements, inscribed on figurines representing prisoners, or on pottery vessels. These were ritually broken and buried as part of a magical rite to curse, that is execrate, those named. Three series of texts dating to the Middle Kingdom include rulers and places in Syria, discovered on bowls from a fortress at Mirgissa in Nubia, c. 1870 B.C. The fact is that Akhenaten did, in effect, campaign in the Levant and that his triumphs certainly resulted in mass deportations from Damascus to Nubia, of the “Apum population” taken as slaves to serve in the Pharaoh’s southern campaign.

The Arameans, a singular and identifiable political and cultural factor in the history of the Near East from the ninth century on, campaigned in the area of Damascus, attracted by the concentration of population on a fertile, well-watered plain dominating one of the region’s principal trade routes. And so the city came to be called Aram-Damascus, indicating Aramean control but referring as well, according to Hebrew texts, to the fifth son of Shem (Sam or Cham) (Genesis 10:22), or perhaps to the grandson of Abraham’s brother Nahor (Genesis 22:21), called in the Bible Aram-Naharaim. Both are considered ancestral to the Arameans.

Aram-Damascus, judging from an inscribed manuscript and personal names of rulers, for example, the great Ben-Hadad, became an Aramean city after the eighth century, though many mercantile transactions or political agreements were written on perishable materials, therefore have been irretrievably lost. Ben-Hadad II, known to the Assyrians as Adad-idri, was in effect, king of Damascus, as early as the mid-ninth century. He was the principal instigator of the anti-Assyrian coalition that united twelve regional kings against Shalmaneser III. In 853 B.C. they took part in the Battle of Qarqar, mentioned in the chapter on Aleppo, where some forty thousand soldiers and four thousand chariots met the Assyrian army. Shalmaneser III claimed victory, as described in his annals, but he had to face the coalition, with varying degrees of success and failure, on several subsequent occasions.

Ben-Hadad II, meanwhile, sometimes identified with Hadad-ezer – they may have been the same person or they may somehow have been related, dynastically or politically -- was murdered by Haza’el, usurper of the throne, c. 844 B.C. (See: Gwendolyn Leick, Who’s Who in the Ancient Near East). And while Haza’el expanded his realm by annexing territories in Transjordan, he also unleashed a long series of conflicts between Damascus and Jerusalem. These were only resolved when Damascus became a vassal state under Jeroboam II.

Haza’el was nevertheless the only king of Damascus whose inscriptions can be definitely identified, in four short notices on bronze horse blinkers, now displayed in the National Museum in Damascus, as well as on a number of ivory plaques. At the site, furthermore, of the ancient Aramean temple of Hadad-Rimmon, in the center of the Damascus Old City -- under the Seleucids the sanctuary of Zeus, for the Romans the Temple of Jupiter, for the Byzantines the shrine of St. John the Baptist, and finally for the Arabs the great Umayyad Mosque – additional inscriptions appeared on stone slabs unearthed in archaeological excavation, carved in relief and featuring a prominent winged sphinx, according to Leonard Wooley the product of a skilled Aramean sculptor, working in the Phoenician style of the eighth century B.C.

As the northernmost inland territory under Egyptian control, Aram-Damascus was subject to threat, or to direct attack, by the Hittites, moving southward after the battle of Kadesh. Ramses II was nonetheless able to retain his hold on the Damascus area, until the invasion of the “Sea Peoples”, which disrupted the entire region.

The defeat of Ramses II by the Hittite Muwatalli left the Hittites in control of the Damascus oasis, therefore of the trade and military routes both northward and inland. This was a blow to Egypt, thus deprived not only of rich resources but also of a strategic location, en route to potential naval stations along the Syro-Canaanite coast, as well as indispensable provisions for its army. Wells, fortresses and military posts had until this time been named for Egyptian kings. The Hittites and the Egyptians, however, ultimately resolved their conflicts in an elaborate Treaty of Peace, giving rise to the emergence of what appear to have been two powerful regional vassal regimes, in Aram-Damascus and in Zobah, in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. Hadad-ezer of Zobah – an ally of Ben-Hadad II, or perhaps himself, with a variation on his name-- may even have annexed the rich and strategic oasis of Damascus, creating a single, albeit subservient, regional authority.

Under King Rezin or Rezon, in Aramaic Radhyan, who according to the record paid tribute to the Assyrians, Damascus reaffirmed its independence, until the Assyrian war of expansion, led by Tiglath-pileser III. His campaign against Damascus resulted in a two-year siege, from 734 to 732, as well as his eventual control of the trade routes, along with all preferential trade agreements. The territory was divided into Assyrian provinces, the people deported and Radhyan executed.

The advance of Sargon II of Akkad, however, pretended more than just military stations or trading positions. He opened Egypt’s “sealed harbor”—actually the “silted harbor”-- in Wadi el-Arish, on the Sinai Peninsula, in order to force trade, under his control, between Egypt and Assyria. Damascus, Samaria and Hamath (Hama) were not destroyed but rather were consigned to the role of mercantile colonies, to be resettled by Assyrian merchants in order to administer – to receive and to transship-- the rich trade in coffee, spices, unguents, incense, perfumes and essences from southern Arabia.

Damascus became the administrative center for a “new province beyond the [Euphrates] river”, under satrapal direction; but while the city was known to have been an important Achaemenid settlement, all remains of the Persian era have been obliterated by modern construction. Berossus, the Hellenistic Babylonian historian, nevertheless mentions that Artaxerxes II introduced a statue cult, dedicated to the deity Anahita, into such provinces of the empire as Damascus, Sardis, Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana and Bactria, and so confirms significant Persian presence in these cities.

Alexander, after peaceably taking Damascus, and leaving it to the custodianship of his general Parmenion, continued his march along the Phoenician coast and thereafter through the Sinai into Egypt. The Seleucids, after him, prospered by his obsessive campaigns and his heroic vision, by opening new trade routes to Berytus (Beirut) and Antioch, departing from Damascus. Even the routes from India passed through Arabia and Petra to Jerusalem and Damascus, and so the greedy, wasteful wars between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, which ultimately led to the demise of both, were fought to defend them.

In time Damascus became part of the Greek Decapolis, along with Gadara, Gerasa, Dium, Philadelphia (Amman), Pella (Apamea), Raphia, Hippo, Scythopolis and Canetha. Each of these cities had Greek institutions and establishments, including temples to Greek gods and goddesses, schools and academies, gymnasiums and palaestras, town planning to either side of a Straight Street, and competitive games.

By the time Pompey stood with his victorious legions in Damascus, in 63 B.C., a highway was begun, to link Damascus to Rome, to serve not only purposes of conquest and colonization, but to transport from this unparalled market center a bouquet of new flavors and aromas. Roman generals and merchants, and alien merchants and slaves, according to Pliny, brought boundless new species from the eastern provinces, among them the peach from Persia, the apricot from Armenia, the cherry from Pontic Cerasus (hence the name), the grape from Syria, specifically the damson (pruna damascena) from Damascus, the plum and filbert from Asia Minor, the walnut from Greece, the olive and the fig from Africa.

The Romans, relatively indifferent to nearly all the inland sites save strategic and trade-rich Palmyra, like the Seleucids before them established their capital in Antioch. The Nabateans, who secured the trade concessions, first from Petra and afterwards from Bosra, were allowed the administration of Damascus, still a city-state. Yet the Temple to Hadad-Rimmon, later the Greek shrine to Zeus, under Septimus Severus was restored and redecorated on a grand scale in the first century A.D., and dedicated to Jupiter as part of the emperor’s program of public works after the civil war of 193. Consistent with Syro-Canaanite tradition, the temple compound encompassed a large, open enclosure with a central chamber and a sacrificial altar. The inner precinct, or temenos, was surrounded by an outer peribolos (of which a few magnificent traces still remain, especially along the eastern access to the Hamidiyye souqs, behind the citadel and around the approaches to the Umayyad mosque). With this, Hadrian conferred the rank of metropolis on Damascus, in 117, a status later raised to colonia under Alexander Severus in 222.

By the end of the second century A.D. the apostles and disciples of Christ, now transformed by Greek name and culture, had spread their word from Damascus to Rome. Philip made converts in Samaria and Caesarea, John established a Christian tradition in Ephesus, and Peter – having escaped from his death sentence in Jerusalem-- preached in the cities of Syria.

Yet the real founder of Christian theology was Paul, born at Tarsus in Cilicia of a Pharisee father, a tentmaker by trade, and, he writes, “educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the Law.” He began his lifetime of religious devotions by attacking Christianity in the name of Judaism, and ended by rejecting Judaism in the name of Christ. He even joined in the stoning of Stephen, and so led the first persecution of Christians in Jerusalem

Hearing that the new faith had made converts in Damascus he obtained authorization from the high priest to travel there, to arrest all “who belonged to the Way”, and bring them out in chains. As his party neared Damascus, says the Acts, he nonetheless “heard a sudden light flash upon him from the heavens, and he was blinded by it. For three days he could not see. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus.”

A few days later he entered the synagogues of Damascus and told their congregations that “Jesus was the son of God”, and to forget anything else they had ever been taught. The provincial governor, goaded by the offended worshipers, issued an order for Paul’s arrest. From his refuge on the upper floors of a house in the Old City, “His new friends lowered him in a basket down to the Straight Street and over the city walls”.

And so began the odyssey, “of hermitage and exaltation, of meditation and preaching, of writings and teachings”, that evolved into a theology based, he claimed, on the redemption of mankind, on salvation from eternal damnation, and the denunciation of all corporal matter as evil, inspired in a history of faith in the gods of Egypt, Asia Minor and Hellas – Osiris, Attis, Dionysus—and so he effected, says Will Durant, the transposition from “the moral vacuum of a dying paganism,” into the vitality of the Greco-Syrian cults of the new religion.

“Molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness. The roads, rivers, and coasts, the trade routes and marketplaces, largely determined the lines of the Church’s growth: eastward from Jerusalem to Damascus and from there to Edessa, Dura Europos, Seleucia and Ctesiphon…” until a plethora of Messiahs and a conflict of creeds made Syria the battleground among the warring factors of religion and heresy, philosophy and virtue, idealism and superstition. “I ceased to live”, said one thinker, “and began to Be, like a pure light, unburdened, agile, and becoming God”. From this would emerge Sufism.

Damascus in 635-636, says Ross Burns, “surrendered twice to a Muslim army”. The second and definitive event, after a six-month siege, entailed capitulation before the forces of the remarkable general Khalid Ibn al-Walid, who called himself “The Sword of Allah”. And so began Damascus’ greatest moment, in 661 A.D., as the capital of the Umayyad Empire, its destiny guided by al-Mu’awiyah, the fifth Caliph.

Under the leadership of Abu Bakr, the first Muslim commander after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, an Islamic ideal spread from the Arabian Peninsula through the “depleted empires” of the Sassanids and the Byzantines. After the first attacks against Iraq and Syria, however, Abu Bakr died. His leadership, and the title of caliph, passed to Umar ibn al-Khattab, who would rule Islam for a decade. Skilled in both politics and military strategy, Umar is considered one of the great early figures in the Arab expansion. After his capture of Damascus and Jerusalem, he moved successfully against Egypt, Iran and Iraq.

Yet, with the death of Umar in 644 Uthman ibn Affan, a merchant from Mecca’s Umayyad family, became the new, and polemic, caliph, a discordant note in the larger consolidation of the Muslim advance, murdered in 656, and with his assassination, the outbreak of civil war. A successor was selected, Muhammed’s son-in-law and cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib. But instead of pacifying the various factions, this choice only served to inflame them, while it accentuated regional, tribal and clan animosities.

Al-Mu’awiyah, now head of Uthman’s family, the Umayyads, and governor of Syria, received the reluctant allegiance of all Islam. And to distance himself from the intrigues, the reactionary sentiment and the tribal strife associated with Mecca, Medina or Jerusalem, he wisely chose Damascus, “already heavy with centuries before the Arabs came,” to be his capital. “Five converging streams made its hinterland the ‘Garden of the Earth’ [a picture to be later recreated in gilded mosaic on the façade of the Mosque], nourished in a hundred public fountains, a hundred public baths, and 120,000 gardens.” (See: Edwin Lane, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, London, 1883).

“Damascus,” said al-Idrisi, a twelfth century historian and Muslim biographer to crusader Roger II, “is the most delightful of all God’s cities. Its rivers, through a metropolis of verdant splendor, flow westward into a ‘Valley of Violets’ twelve miles long and three miles wide.”

“Like other imperial monarchs before him,” says Ira Lapidus (see: A History of Islamic Societies), “given to validation through pomp, al-Mu’awiyah took as his model the Byzantine emperors, who had in turn taken as their model the Persian King of Kings.” And so, in the heart of the town, as described by Will and Ariel Durant, “amid a population of some 140,000 souls, rose the palace of the caliphs, gaudy with gold and marble, brilliant with mosaics in floors and walls, cool with ever-flowing fountains and cascades.”

When the Arabs invaded Syria, they were, says the record, “a barely cohesive band of tribesmen, caravan traders, shepherds and desert warriors”, and their sole art was poetry. Mohammed was believed to have forbidden sculpture and painting as tantamount to idolatry; and music, rich silks, gold and silver ornaments “as epicurean degeneracy”. All these prohibitions, however, when confronted with influences from the vast extensions of Islamic dominance – from China to the Atlantic, literally, from the ends of the earth—the sanctions were gradually overcome, especially for secular purposes; yet initially they confined Muslim art to pottery and ceramic, and to decoration based either on botanical motifs, geometry or calligraphy; or to architecture, Islam’s most glorious and exultant expression.

The Umayyad Empire lasted only 90 years and the exorbitant palace of the caliphs – ostentation is, after all, viewed as a sin -- was long ago demolished; but Islam’s first dynasty nonetheless provided Damascus with the Grand Mosque, its most enduring monument. Built during his twenty year reign by the Caliph al-Walid after 706 A.D., and conceived as an enormous community prayer hall, the mosque was a creation of both Syrian and Byzantine architects and craftsmen and was integrated with remains of the prior construction. During the Roman era the Temple of Jupiter had occupied the site. On its ruins Theodosius I, in 379 A.D., had erected the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Walid, about the year 705, proposed to the Christians that the cathedral should be remodeled, to form part of a new mosque, and promised to give them ground and materials for another cathedral, in any part of the city they choose. They protested, and warned him that “it is written in our books that he who moves, removes or desecrates this church will choke to death.”

Walid nonetheless began construction, it was told, with his bare hands. The entire land tax of the empire, for seven years, was devoted in its entirety to the edification of the mosque. In addition, a large sum was granted to the Christians in order to finance their new cathedral. Artists and artisans were brought from India, Persia, Constantinople, Egypt, Libya, Tunis and Algeria and in total 12,000 workmen were employed. The task was completed, according to the record, in eight, perhaps ten, years. Muslim travelers described it as “the most magnificent structure in Islam”. The Abbasid caliphs al-Mahdi and al-Mamun, “no lovers,” says Durant, “of either Damascus or the Umayyads, ranked it above all other buildings on the earth.”

According to the descriptions of the time, “A huge, exterior wall with battlements referring to an Assyrian and a Persian past, shielded the interior colonnades, which enclosed a gigantic marble-paved court [granted by perspective an even greater dimension]. On the south side of this enclosure rose the mosque, built of squared stones and guarded by three minarets –one of which is reputed to be the oldest in Islam. Ground plan, and exquisite mosaic decoration of the exterior, in scenes describing the gardens of Paradise, were Byzantine. The roof and dome – fifty meters in diameter, also Byzantine-- were covered with plates of lead. The interior, 150 meters long, was divided into nave and aisles by two tiers of white marble columns, from whose gold-plated Corinthian capitals sprang round or horseshoe arches, the first Muslim examples of this latter form, [inspired, says Will Durant, in a cave temple at Nasik, India, from the second century B.C., which in turn were used in a Christian church at Nisibis in Mesopotamia in 359 A.D.].”

The mosaic floor was deeply cushioned by hundreds of the empire’s carpet makers’ finest work. The walls were faced with colored marble mosaics and enameled tiles, a reference, say the art historians of the time, to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Six intricately incised grilles, confected of the finest marble, divided the interior space. On the wall facing Mecca was a miqrab adorned with gold, silver and precious stones. Seventy-four windows of colored glass and twelve thousand lamps, each a masterpiece of its kind, provided the lighting. A Byzantine ambassador, stunned with admiration, remarked that “a daily sojourn over a hundred years would still provide something new to see every day.”

Said a Greek traveler to his companion, “had I doubted the will and the wisdom of the Arabs, my admiration would be reinforced in this building, and I would be convinced of their endurance for a great length of days.” Yet the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus was irreparably damaged by fire in 1069, was restored, was burned nearly to the ground by Timur (Tamerlane) in 1400, was rebuilt, and was again nearly devastated by fire in 1894, when it was restored, with certain artistic liberties, by the Turkish regime of the last Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, a notoriously insular and insensitive man. Since then, plaster and whitewash have replaced a good deal of the lavish medieval decoration, carpets are of commercial quality and most of the lamps are nondescript. What has remained, through all of this, is the Christian inscription on the lintel, that the Muslims, presumably for reasons of religious tolerance, or the universality of God, or perhaps for fear of choking to death, never erased: “Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth forever.”

A number of experimental styles in craft and architecture were employed in the Great Mosque or emerged as a result of the experience of its construction. Much has been written, for example, regarding the use of the minaret (manara, a lighthouse). It was said that the Syrian Muslims developed a variety of styles inspired jointly in the Babylonian ziggurat and the Christian bell tower, while the Persians choose as their inspiration the cylindrical form of the Indian towers. Perhaps the African Muslims were influenced by the four-cornered Pharos, or lighthouse, of Alexandria. Initially the minaret was simple, square or rectangular, and mostly unadorned. “In later centuries, visible especially in Syria’s seemingly endless variety, it sought a lofty slenderness, fragile balconies, decorative arcades and faïence surfaces,” as described by James Fergusson (see: History of Architecture of All Countries, London, 1874), “and became, without a doubt, the most graceful form of tower architecture in the world.”

The metal workers of Islam acquired Sassanian techniques, to make great bronze, brass or copper lamps, ewers, bowls, jugs, mugs, cups, basins and braziers, cast in forms as diverse as lions, dragons, sphinxes, peacocks and doves, or incised in lace-like patterns. A number of craftsmen filled the incised designs with silver or gold, and made “damascened” metal, an art practiced, says Will Durant, but not originated, in Damascus. The swords of Damascus, however, were even more famous, forged of tempered steel, adorned with reliefs or inlaid with arabesques, scripts or other patterns in gold or silver threads. “The metalworkers of Damascus,” affirms Durant, “were at the top of their art.”

Aleppo and Damascus during this period were both adept at what are customarily referred to as the minor arts, “but which hardly deserve so slighting a name”, says Will Durant, “since they produced frail marvels of glass with enamel designs”, as well as Koran cases, manuscripts, pottery and ceramic, sculpture and relief, in addition to textiles – silks, satins, brocades, embroideries, gold-woven velvets, hangings, tents, and rugs that were, said master portrait-painter John Singer Sargent, “worth all the pictures ever painted.” Painting itself was nevertheless a major art, but in miniature, yet applied as well on a grander scale to murals and portraiture, particularly during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods.

Muslim literature was originally confined to the Koran. Since the word qur’an means a “reading” or a “discourse”, and is applied by Muslims to their sacred scriptures, it is assumed that “every syllable was inspired by God”, while it remains the work of only one man. “It is therefore,” says Will Durant, “the most influential book ever produced by a single hand.” Yet the text was to pass through many hands and a number of processes in order to achieve its current form. At various times during the later years of his life Mohammed surely dictated one or another fragment of the text of his revelations. Notes would have been made on parchment, leather, palm leaves or bones, and these were, in fact, deposited at random in various receptacles, with no regard for ideological, theological or chronological order. Nor was any collection of the fragments ever assembled during the Prophet’s lifetime; “but people close to him knew them by heart,” it was told, “and so served as living texts”.

In the year 633, however, the Caliph Abu Bakr sent Zaid ibn Thabit, who had been close to Mohammed, “to search out the Koran and reassemble it.” Fragments thus came to light, according to tradition, “from date leaves and tablets of white stone, and the breasts of men.” From Zaid’s manuscript a number of copies were made, but the words had no vowels; public readers interpreted each idea differently. As diverse texts appeared in different cities with discrepant scriptures, the Caliph Uthman commissioned Zaid and three Quraish scholars to revise Zaid’s manuscript. Copies of the official version were finally sent, in 651 to Damascus, as well as to Kufa and Basra in Iraq, “where the texts have been preserved,” say Muslim scholars, “with unparalleled purity and reverential care.”

Despite the concern of purists for the Prophet’s word, beginning with the Umayyads all forms of literature -- poetry, philosophy, theology, history, narrative, in fact every expression of the world of the written word -- flourished to satisfy the appetites of the descendents of the unlettered desert dwellers of a generation before. “The poets and savants,” says Durant, “encouraged by the plethora of colleges and universities -- Damascus alone, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, came to have thirty -- became as celebrated as the artists and architects of the time.” Thousands of manuscripts in Arabic, dedicated to science in general, and in particular to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, pharmacology, history, geography, navigation, jurisprudence and philosophy, still lie hidden in the libraries of Damascus, among other cities of the Muslim world, whose great collections have yet to be catalogued.

Hospitals under Muslim rule were given as much importance as the arts and general science. The most famous treatment center in Islam was the bimaristan, founded in Damascus in 706. In 978, still in full operation, it numbered twenty-four physicians on its staff. The physician-vizier Ali ibn Isa organized a medical team to operate in the field, c. 931, to go from place to place to tend the sick. Numerous physicians considered it their duty to make daily visits to jails. A hospital founded by Nuradin in Damascus, in 1160, offered free treatment and medication through three centuries, and it was said that during 267 years “its fires were never extinguished.” Not only medical care but also medical instruction was offered at the hospitals. No man could practice medicine, however, without first passing an examination, and receiving a state diploma. Druggists, barbers and orthopedists were also subject to state regulation, and regular inspection. There was especially humane treatment for the mentally ill. But public sanitation was poor and largely underdeveloped. In four centuries, forty epidemics ravaged the various countries of the Muslim east.

WALKING THROUGH DAMASCUS:

The unrelenting sun is still bright, well into mid-afternoon. We had spent the day in Bosra, stopping for lunch at a very pretentious and modern roadside restaurant normally favored by politicians and tourists, but dessert, as is the custom, consisted only of the traditional bowl of fresh oranges, to be peeled at the table. There would still be time, if we hurry, for an ice cream -- one of those astonishing cream puddings, pounded with a wooden bludgeon into the bottom and sides of a tin container, rather like a milk can, that has been inserted into a tub of ice; then the cold mixture is slid with a spatula off the sides of the tub, by layers that curl while they are finally rolled in crushed pistachio nuts-- at the famous Bekdach parlor in the souqs, along the Hamidiyye. Truly, an experience. Then we will have our coffee, or qahwa (which means both the coffee and the coffee-house) at the al-Nawfara (or an-Nafura, “The Fountain”), in the Old City, or the Ash-Shams, installed in a former bathhouse, behind the Grand Mosque. At sundown a hakawiti or storyteller will take his place on a chair in a corner, to try to reinforce the dying tradition of the narrative. Garbed in the baggy trousers and waistcoat of the Druze, with a Turkish fez on his head, he will recount nightly the tale of Sultan Baibars, in 356 installments, or perhaps the story of Muslim hero Antar ibn Shadad, an epic, if it were related in full, that would require a year in the telling.

Our gorgeous Cham Palace Hotel is located in the center of modern Damascus, surrounded by office buildings (occupied mostly by doctors of varying specializations whose shingles, in Arabic and English, dangle by tiers over the sidewalks), airline offices, apartment towers, and western-style clothing shops.

We have to cross a number of busy streets, without traffic lights, to reach an expressway, whose endless and maniacal flow seems insidiously indifferent to our attempts to inch across, one lane at a time. We are terrified. Wael, our guide, strides along ahead of us, to show by his nonchalance how unfounded our fears are. He is slim and beautiful, and lithe as a cat. Beyond the cars, now on the other side, the obstacles are human, but with the same careless ease he maneuvers through and around them. We pass the eerie tiled magnificence of the Iranian Cultural Center, with its parade of students and diplomats, next to a popular rooftop coffeehouse.

Nearby is Hejaz Square, originally created as a showcase for the Hejaz Train Station, the northern terminus of another of the ambitious undertakings of the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, completed in 1909 and intended to transport pilgrims to the Holy Places in Mecca and Medina. A commemorative locomotive outside the station dates from 1908 and serves as a public water fountain.

We have reached “Martyrs’ Square”, formerly “Place Merjeh”, once the prestigious center of early twentieth century French Damascus. The martyrs in question were victims of a French bombardment in response to an uprising in 1945. A bronze column, the careful and loving work of an unidentified Italian sculptor, intended to commemorate the opening of the first telegraph office in the Middle East (with a line from Damascus to Medina), stands in the center of the plaza, crowned by a diminutive replica of the Umayyad Mosque. The Victoria Hotel, where among others Lawrence stayed, and long past its prime, is crowded into the intrusive construction of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Perhaps the most enticing relic, an institution in fact, are the sweet shops, their windows, framing the reflection of the shrouded women who glare and gaze through the glass, are piled high with towers and pyramids of glistening pastries.
East of “Martyrs’ Square” the streets are filled with small shops but when we stop to investigate Wael urges us along, feigning annoyance at the crowds around the corner of the Sharia ash-Shohada, who are clustered into the cackling, bustling poultry market. Turkeys, ducks, geese and chickens are jammed among canaries and parakeets, and even falcons and eagles. The boys hawking them – is there a popular wisdom in the expression? -- turn away from my camera. Their trade is illegal here as elsewhere, but they are absolutely defiant of international protection to endangered species.

We have reached a broad boulevard called Sharia an-Nasr, with its nineteenth century Ottoman construction, now devoted to banks, schools, and government offices. Ahead of us looms the massive Damascus citadel, boundary between modern Damascus and the Old City. A stirring sculpture of Saladin, mounted on his agile steed and surrounded by his protective captains on foot, their swords unsheathed and lances primed, occupies a good piece of the sidewalk. The citadel has long been closed for archaeological exploration and general repair but is nonetheless a formidable presence. It occupies the western extreme of a prior Roman fortress, expanded during the Ayyubid era as part of Saladin’s thirteenth century defenses against the Crusaders. Much of the construction was damaged during the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but was repaired under the Mamluks and again expanded under the Ottomans, who employed the site as their military headquarters and prison.

Ottoman construction extends into the souks, and the great axial thoroughfare called the Hamidiyye, that ends in the ruins of the Roman propylaea. Many of the shops are tourist traps. Since Wael is Christian he has taken us to one of these, where we enthusiastically purchase antique silver, silk and leather. The silver is stamped as Sterling but when we return to Mexico we find it is only “coin silver”, of low content. On a subsequent trip to Damascus, on a stroll through the Old City, it just happens that we enter the Hamidiyye on a Friday, with our Muslim guide. Almost everything is closed, except the establishments owned by the Christian merchants. By chance we see, and recognize, the shop where we had made our previous purchases and in defiance we enter, to demand an explanation. The owner, who never expected to see us again, and certainly not a year later, claims that the craftsman who supplies the merchandise has not only cheated us, but has cheated him, as well, by applying the international sign of Sterling silver to an article of inferior quality. “Actually,” he says, “I think the stuff you bought must have been made in India. Their work is in every way inferior to Syrian craftsmanship.” He has dismissed us. Buyer, beware!

When Lawrence entered Damascus with the Arab Revolt on the 16 of October 1918, he went directly to visit Saladin’s tomb. Next to the Calligraphy Museum, the al-Jaqmaqiyya -- once a fifteenth century madrassa enclosed by a Byzantine patio, just to one side of the Great Mosque-- the modest shrine or mausoleum stands nestled under the ruins of the Roman walls and arches. Adorned only with tiles and calligraphy – verses from the Koran – the room is surprisingly small and modest, barely large enough to accommodate two sarcophagi. One, in walnut, decorated with simple design motifs from the Ayyubid period that Saladin in fact founded, is the true repository of his remains. The gaudy marble sarcophagus next to it was a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Abdul Hamid II, when the German emperor was currying the Sultan’s favor on behalf of his interests in southeastern Europe. (See: Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries).

On the eastern side of the great courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque stands the shrine of Hussein -- son of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and one of the first converts to the new faith -- victim, with his followers, of an ambush in Karbala, Iraq. His death would set in motion the tempers and events that ultimately culminated in the irreparable division of Islam into Sunni and Shi’ite. The proud green tomb inside the shrine, which opens to the swarms of the faithful on Fridays, contains Hussein’s head.

A short distance away, through the lanes of the Old City, stands another mausoleum, which holds the remains of Hussein’s daughter, Ruqayya bint al-Hussein ash-Shaheed bi Kerbala, considered a Muslim saint. Originally a simple refuge hidden among the modest dwellings north of the Umayyad Mosque, the Ruqayya Sayyida was converted in 1985 to one of the most dazzling architectural creations in Damascus, treasured by the Shi’ite community. The new mosque, in a sober and geometric modern Persian style, consists of a tasteful and beautifully proportioned marble patio and portico, with creamy marble dome and minaret, so exquisitely decorated they look like ivory artifacts, glowing in the afternoon sun. The dreamlike interior, however, as if from another planet, is bathed in the gleam, glint and glow of a million lights, that beam through the minutely crafted and impeccably assembled fragments of beveled mirror on dozens of chandeliers. The mirror mosaic continues on the beams, columns, and vaulted ceilings, as carefully incrusted as the gemstones on a fine jewel. And all the while the spectator remains caught inside the jewel, a prisoner of the light that flows and courses and lifts and swirls in every direction.

The Shi’ite community is reputedly withdrawn. My experience was otherwise. Men, women and children, in their Friday finery, wanted only to pose for me, and to ask that I send them a picture. They posed in the aisles, they posed while seated on their stools as they fingered their prayer beads, they posed by the bookcases with the hundreds of different new, used and recycled copies of the Koran, they posed in front of Ruqayya’s opulent tomb, they posed while they prayed (glancing up at me with cautious smiles while their lips moved in pious concentration). They posed from their genuflections on the lavish carpets. They posed from under their shawls. They even wanted to have someone else take the picture so they could pose with me.
One of my favorite walks is through another Shi’ite mosque, outside Damascus in the small and otherwise undistinguished town of Karaj as-Sitt, about ten kilometers south of the city. A quite different example of a modern Persian style, based on traditional tilework, the Sayyida Zeinab houses the tomb of Mohammed’s granddaughter, while it is said to emulate the style of the Shi’ite monument in Karbala, in southern Iraq, where Hussein was ambushed and murdered.

The entire construction is covered with typically Persian tiles in blue, green and turquoise, in stylizations of a botanical design that presumably portrays “The Gardens of Paradise”. Freestanding twin minarets, visible from a great distance, are not only a marvel for the tiles that completely cover the brick, steel and concrete core, but for their enormous height – probably well over thirty meters-- each topped with a graceful balcony, and verses from the Koran. Additional verses, in delicate calligraphy, are complemented by the floral panels in the lateral courtyards. The great gilded onion-shaped dome, flashing and pulsating with sunlight, rises over the prayer hall. The four principal entrances to the central patio pass through an arcaded corridor along the courtyard’s periphery. The mosaic of people, as bewitching as the design of the construction, is just as friendly as everywhere else, and just as eager to be photographed, but non-Muslims are not allowed inside the sanctuary to see the tomb.

On the other hand, the mosques of the ramshackle old Salihiyye quarter, tucked along the slopes of Mount Kassiun (Jebel Qassioun), are Syrian, Sunni, and open to anyone who cares to enter. Since we had happily chosen another Friday for this particular walk, every mosque, madrassa and mausoleum was available and the people just as eager to pose.

We approached the quarter from below and rose level by level through noisy, crowded Kurdish street markets and pushcarts full of clothing, into the Hanbila mosque. Founded in 1202, this was the first Friday mosque established outside the Damascus Old City, built in order to accommodate the Hanbila refugees, who had been forced out of Jerusalem by the Crusaders. The interior of the mosque, like the exterior of its painted dome, is bright green, so is bathed in the green light reflected from the green walls, ceiling, tiles, grilles, the steps of the minbar, the upholstery of the divans. During the Ayyubid era it received the patronage of the governing class that funded the madrassas, so served as well as a place of pilgrimage, and veneration of the tombs of celebrated heroes and mystics deposited in the airless and crowded funerary chamber, down the stairs to the left, among them Mohi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi, born in Andalusia in 1165, whose descriptions of Hell were said to have served as Dante’s inspiration for the “Inferno”. He died in Damascus in 1240.

How much of love is laughter? How much of faith is the promise of redemption? How much of beauty is a moment, when time, like breathing or a scent, stops in its tracks, looks around, and says, “I may have been here before. I may have loved like this.” A lacy minaret rises above a narrow, crowded street. Nostalgic? Hard to say. A stone and mud-brick wall falls in on itself. A beam sags on the upper level of a house so lopsided it can barely stand, but it holds firm. This is al-Akrad, the Kurdish quarter. A grapevine, gone mad, has grown across a wall and over the street and down the other side, nearly blocking the entrance to a house. And so it has been since Nuradin brought refugees from Jerusalem to this place. Their numbers, in time, swelled with immigrant groups, both Islamic and non-Islamic, the baggage and the tatters from wars and persecution in Crete or Cyprus or Salonika, crammed into lanes and dwellings already cramped and strained, in al-Muhajirin, the Cretan quarter. When it collapsed with the earthquakes people simply moved back into the rubble. It was leveled by the Mongols and raised again by the Mamluks. When the Tura and the Yazid, two branches of the Barada, came to overflow, Salihiyye was inundated, so the rivers were channeled down the side of the mountain; and Salihiyye persisted.

A child follows us with his eyes, shielded by the battered wall of the upper level of his house, and the tangle of electrical cables. The second story overhangs the street, above the fruit and vegetable seller, probably his mother, with her tomatoes, warm from the sun, an eggplant, a cauliflower. A man with a cigarette dangling between his fingers sells fresh flatbread, hot on the grill. He smiles through his level gaze, from behind his tinted glasses. A satellite dish –one of the “sunflowers of Damascus” – like a perky bow, peers over the end of a roof. Wael called them that. When you stand at the edge of the lookout on the Mount Kassiun road, they spread out over the landscape of houses, of the modest quarters and the grand, turning this way and that, as if to follow the rays of the sun.

One of my favorite characters in history was Sir Richard Burton, from whom the Welsh actor took his name. The original Burton (1821-1890) crossed “The Mountains of the Moon” in search of the source of the Nile but long before he had gained a modest following as an Orientalist, specifically an Arabist, with his gift for translation of the untranslatable language. His versions of “The Thousand and One Nights”, “The Garden of Delights”, and the “Kama Sutra” are still considered definitive. With his swashbuckling features and flawless Arabic, and disguised as a desert traveler, he even smuggled himself into Mecca, and lived to tell the tale. When he married Isabel, and she obtained a posting for him as British Consul in Damascus, from 1869 to 1871, he wrote later that these were the two happiest years of his life. Consular offices, however, were located on an airless lane downtown in the hot, dusty Old City, whose gates, furthermore, were locked at night. So the Burtons took a house in Salihiyye, in those days a Kurdish quarter of 15,000 inhabitants. In her letters Isabel described the house on the slopes of Mount Kassiun, flanked on one side by a mosque and on the other by a Turkish bathhouse. On the roof terrace, with the pergola and the grapevines, they received their guests.

Salihiyye is being picked away, piece by piece, so is left to rot and collapse, thus making more acceptable the construction of concrete block high-rise apartment towers and modern shopping areas with hygienic thoroughfares and space for parking. There will be no more narrow stone lanes shaded by the grapevines that grow across them, no more buttressed closed balconies that touch, as if to share a secret one side to the other, no more sagging shutters, no more furtive cats, no more hidden glances. Will the mosques and the bathhouses also vanish? Keep in mind that there are 572 mosques in Damascus, and just under 300 historical monuments, seventy of which are tucked into the dilapidation of Salihiyye.

Down the hill and halfway across the city, in a palace of sorts all its own, lies the incomparable National Museum, the most famous and most important of all Syria’s repositories of the art and cultural relics of close to ten thousand years. I have been there, guidebook in hand, six times and probably have not seen it all. And if the murals from the synagogue in Doura Europos, the hypogeum from Palmyra and the huge room with a thousand years of Islamic woodwork are the most memorable exhibits, less striking, but equally significant are the pre-classical galleries devoted to Ugarit, Ebla and Mari; the classical galleries from the Roman and Byzantine periods, especially of Palmyra and the Hauran; and the Islamic galleries: coins, jewelry, pottery, weaponry, even fragments from a ceiling brought from the desert palace west of Palmyra, the Qasr al-Heir al-Gharbi, to complement the recovered great gateway that serves as the Museum’s monumental entrance.

And visible from its gardens, just crossing the avenue, is the Takiyya as-Suleimaniyya, a complex of mosque and madrassas created, beginning in 1554, by Sinan, the greatest of Ottoman architects, favorite of Suleiman the Magnificent, “the Law-Giver”, the greatest of all Ottoman sultans, so creator as well of the modifications that converted Hagia Sofia into a mosque, as well as the Blue Mosque and the Suleiman Mosque, all in Istanbul. Takiyya is a Sufi term referring to a lodge or a hostel, especially for the housing of pilgrims. The Turkish style, with its broad dome and tall, slim minarets, shares its grounds with the military museum, and beyond, where the madrassas used to be, an artisan center, including a workshop for glass blowing. The latter is no novelty for me. The last surviving Umeya took his glass and his pottery to Spain, when he founded the Caliphate of Cordoba, and from there they went to Mexico. But that is another story.

And so Damascus is endless, so vast and so varied the pedestrian traveler could lose his way and find it again, throughout a lifetime. Maybe all great cities are like that. But not all cities were the stuff of kings and caliphs and crusaders and conquerors. Not all cities were the marketplace of three continents. And not all cities were built on the passions and pillage, the faith and folly, of ten thousand years of tangible civilization, layered like the syrup-drenched mille feuilles in the sweet shops on Martyrs’ Square.
 

Carol Miller, a regular contributor to www.syriagate.com and an assiduous traveler in Syria, is a sculptress, journalist, author and translator, and a long-time resident of Mexico City. She is known for her research in cultural convergence, comparative mythology, archaeology and history, as well as general travel. Her other books, "The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl" with Guadalupe Rivera Marin (Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com); and "Travels in the Maya World", "The Other Side of Yesterday, the China-Maya Connection" and "Training Juan Domingo: Mexico and Me", can be reviewed, with bio and excerpts, at http://www.xlibris.com/CarolMiller.html